You've seen it, even if you didn't have a name for it. Brass gears meshing inside an impossible machine. An airship drifting over a fog-choked London skyline. A mechanical octopus, half creature and half engine, its tentacles wrapped around a submarine made of copper rivets and polished wood.
It's a world that feels simultaneously ancient and futuristic, familiar and fantastical—a world that never existed but somehow feels like it should have.
That world is steampunk. And it's far more than just an aesthetic trend. It's a creative movement that asks one of the most evocative questions in art and design: what if the future had been built with the technology of the past?
Where Steampunk Comes From
The word itself is a playful riff on "cyberpunk," the gritty science fiction genre that dominated the 1980s with visions of neon-lit, digitally dystopian futures. In 1987, author K.W. Jeter used "steampunk" in a letter to Locus magazine, half-jokingly, to describe the Victorian-era science fiction he and fellow writers Tim Powers and James Blaylock were producing. The joke stuck.
But the creative lineage runs much deeper than the 1980s. Steampunk's true ancestors are Jules Verne and H.G. Wells—writers who, in the 19th century, imagined submarines, time machines, and journeys to the moon using the technology of their own era. Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) gave us Captain Nemo's Nautilus, a vessel that combined the elegance of a Victorian parlor with the engineering of an industrial submarine. Wells gave us the Time Machine and Martian war machines. These weren't steampunk—the genre hadn't been named—but they established the core tension that defines the aesthetic: advanced imagination constrained by steam-age materials.
This visual language solidified in the mid-20th century. Harper Goff's iconic design for the Nautilus in Disney's 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea—all rivets, pipe organs, and Victorian opulence—is widely cited as a foundational image for what would eventually become steampunk design. From there, the aesthetic spread through literature, film, comics, fashion, and the maker community until it became the fully realized cultural movement it is today.
What Makes Something Steampunk
Steampunk is built on a set of recurring visual and philosophical elements that are easy to recognize once you know what to look for.
Materials matter.
- Brass, copper, polished wood, leather, iron, and glass dominate. Plastics, chrome, and anything that reads as "modern" are deliberately absent.
- The aesthetic celebrates materials you can see and feel—things that patina with age rather than become obsolete.
Mechanism is visible.
- Steampunk machines don't hide their workings behind sleek casings. Gears, cogs, pipes, pistons, and springs are exposed, displayed, even celebrated.
- There's a philosophical statement embedded in this: technology should be comprehensible, not opaque. You should be able to look at a machine and understand—or at least imagine—how it works.
The Victorian era is the foundation, but not the limit.
- The visual vocabulary draws from roughly 1837 to 1910—the age of top hats and corsets, gaslight and coal smoke, the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition.
- But steampunk doesn't recreate the Victorian era faithfully. It romanticizes selectively, taking the elegance and ingenuity while leaving behind the era's darker realities.
o The best steampunk art acknowledges this tension rather than ignoring it.
The impossible is treated as plausible.
- Airships the size of cities.
- Mechanical limbs powered by clockwork.
- Submarines with pipe organs.
- Steampunk doesn't demand scientific accuracy—it demands internal consistency. If a machine looks like it could work, that's enough.
Steampunk's Extended Family: Biopunk and Beyond
Steampunk doesn't exist in isolation. Over the decades, it has spawned and merged with a constellation of related aesthetics, each with its own twist on the retro-futuristic formula.
Biopunk replaces machines with organic systems—biological engineering, mutant creatures, and living technology. Steampunk asks, "What if the future ran on steam?"
While biopunk asks, "What if the future ran on biology?"
The results tend to be wilder, more surreal, and more than a little unsettling. Think less brass gears, more tentacles and exoskeletons.
Dieselpunk shifts the timeline forward to the 1920s–1950s, drawing from Art Déco design, World War II technology, and the pulp adventure aesthetic.
Clockpunk goes the other direction, into Renaissance-era mechanics and Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks.
Solarpunk imagines an optimistic future powered by renewable energy and ecological harmony—steampunk's idealistic younger sibling.
The most interesting art often sits at the boundaries between these categories, combining elements in ways that resist easy classification. A mechanical octopus with organic tentacles and brass-fitted diving apparatus, for instance, lives in the overlap between steampunk and biopunk—a space where Victorian engineering meets biological wonder.
Which brings us, not entirely by accident, to a particular puzzle.
Octopolis: Steampunk Art You Can Touch
The Octopolis puzzle by Hungry Minds is a 1,000-piece illustration that lives exactly at this very intersection of steampunk, biopunk, and psychedelic fantasy. Designed by lead illustrator Lev Kaplan, the image depicts a sprawling, tentacled metropolis where mechanical creatures and organic forms are fused together in intricate, hand-drawn detail.
Every inch of the illustration rewards close attention. Brass-plated automatons share the frame with biomechanical sea creatures. Industrial scaffolding intertwines with organic tendrils. The color palette shifts from warm coppers and deep greens to unexpected bursts of iridescent color—the kind of image that reveals new details with every viewing.
The uniquely shaped pieces add another dimension to the experience. This isn't a grid of identical interlocking rectangles—each piece is shaped to reflect the organic, unpredictable world of the illustration itself. And when you finish, there's a sealed envelope included in the box that you're instructed not to open until the last piece is in place.
We won't spoil what's inside. Half the fun is the mystery.
If you're drawn to steampunk's blend of beauty, ingenuity, and wonder—or if you've never heard the term but something in this article made you lean forward—Octopolis is the aesthetic made physical. A piece of art you build with your hands, discover with your eyes, and keep coming back to.
Why Steampunk Endures
In an age of invisible technology—algorithms we can't see, wireless signals we can't feel, devices designed to be as featureless and opaque as possible—steampunk offers something radical: technology you can manipulate and actually observe working. Machines with visible moving parts. Devices made from materials that age beautifully. A world where craftsmanship is celebrated, not hidden.
There's also something deeply inspirational about the steampunk vision. It imagines a world where aesthetics and engineering are not in conflict—where a machine can be both functional and beautiful, where progress doesn't require the abandonment of craft. In that sense, steampunk isn't really about the past at all. It's about a unique vision of the future. One where the things we make are as extraordinary as the ideas behind them.
That's a future we can get behind.
Hungry Minds is an independent publishing house and creative studio building a world of ideas designed to feed the hungry mind in us all. Explore our full collection of books, puzzles, and curiosities.
