Defining steampunk

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Early takes:

Wacko victorian fantasies.
K.W. Jeter & Michael Berry, 1987

Everything Jules Verne could have written.
Everything H.G. Wells should have written.
Everything A. Conan Doyle thought of but never published because it was too fantastic.
Frank Chadwick, 1988

Speculative fiction:

Any sf... set in any version of the previous century from which entropy has been banned as a metaphorical governor of the alternate industrial revolution of choice.
John Clute

Victorian Steampunk is any work of modern Science Fiction which is: set in the Victorian-Edwardian period; imitates the style, themes, and content of Scientific Romance, Gothic horror, and Imperialist Adventure; and may use characters from those genres as well. Fantasy Steampunk is any Sci-Fi which combines elements of Fantasy and the Industrial Revolution, mixing magic and steam power.
Cory Gross

Steampunk is an entirely modern aesthetic born of disenchantment with the world-that-is and a desire to create an ephemeral world-that-never-was. It combines the Victorian, the modern, and the fantastic.
Sister Shuriken of Sweet Reason

Steampunk is a re-envisioning of the past with the hypertechnological perceptions of the present. Unfortunately, most so-called "steampunk" is simply dressed-up, recreationary nostalgia: the stifling tea-rooms of Victorian imperialists and faded maps of colonial hubris.
Catastrophone Orchestra and Arts Collective

Retrofuturism:

Cyberpunk emerged as a genre that allowed writers to look forward - even if only 20 minutes into the future - while what I am calling retrofuturism represented a genre that allowed people to look backwards, examining older myths and fantasies against contemporary realities.
Henry Jenkins

Retro-futurism has been proven almost entirely wrong about future predictions. [...] And I suppose that one could argue steampunk's been proven wrong also, but there's a difference of course, where retro-futurism, when it was created, didn't know that it was wrong, while steampunk, being created after the period it's set in, had always known to be wrong about their depictions, because those depictions have been of the past.
Nick Ottens

Technological SF:

How the past would have been different if the future had happened sooner.
Douglas Fetherling

Modern technology as depicted using an earlier form of technology.
MobyGames

Science fiction which has a historical setting (esp. based on industrialized, nineteenth-century society) and characteristically features steam-powered, mechanized machinery rather than electronic technology.
Oxford English Dictionary

A genre of literature, film or television that applies science fiction to historical periods to reimagine how technology might have developed differently and what that would have meant for society in general.
Aaron Wherry

Steampunk constitutes a special case among alternative histories, a science fiction subgenre that postulates a fictional event of vast consequences in the past and extrapolates from this event a fictional though historically contingent present or future.
Steffen Hentke

Steampunk vs Cyberpunk:

Well, you know what cyberpunk is, right? Always takes place in some dark, dystopian FUTURE. Steampunk is similar to that in theory, except that it takes place in a dark, dystopian PAST.
Disembodied_Brain

Cyberpunk: "High-Tech Low-Life".
Steampunk: "Low-Tech High-Life".
Anonymous

Aesthetics:

Steampunk no longer examines context and history but now looks ironically at its own roots, tropes and cliches.
Michael Moorcock

I'm of the opinion that discussing steampunk as a genre or sub-genre is wrong-headed. Like rock and roll, steampunk is a style, not a substance: Jake Von Slatt "steampunked" a laptop; Tim Powers "steampunked" the time travel story in The Anubis Gates; Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill did the same for superhero teams with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; and to bring our discussion back to rock and roll, Abney Park can be said to "steampunk" rock music.
Mike Perschon

The idea of steampunk as dark pseudo-Victorian fun.
Jeff VanderMeer

Steampunk uses the techniques of collage (change of context, crossovers, anachronism) to create new, enhanced versions of the 19th century -- to make them "cool" for contemporary audience.
Piechur [Steampunkopedia]

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