For Fans of Steampunk

Arkane Studios' Dishonored does something most steampunk stories do not: it takes the class politics seriously. Dunwall is a whale-oil empire run by aristocrats and enforced by plague, and every gadget you pick up was built by someone who had no say in how it would be used. The setting is not costume; it is argument. Steampunk at its sharpest has always been a comment on industrial capitalism, and Dishonored puts that critique into every rooftop chase and back-alley assassination. The sequel Dishonored 2 extends this with Meagan Foster and Emily Kaldwin, giving the mechanical world two women who move through it with different kinds of power.

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's 1990 novel imagined Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine actually working, and then asked what Victorian society would do with computing power. The answer is not reassuring. The Difference Engine is a novel about surveillance, class war, and the way technology amplifies existing power structures rather than dismantling them. It is a harder, stranger book than most steampunk that followed, and it remains the genre's most intellectually serious entry. Fans of the aesthetic who have not read the source material are missing the argument that made it worth making.

Hayao Miyazaki did not set out to make a steampunk film, which is probably why Howl's Moving Castle is the genre's most purely joyful entry. The castle itself, clanking and smoking and strutting across the countryside on chicken legs, is pure mechanical absurdism. But the film's emotional core, a young woman finding her agency in a world at war, earns every gear and chimney. Diana Wynne Jones's source novel is equally essential, warmer and funnier and stranger than the adaptation. Between the two, you get the best argument for steampunk as a genre of possibility rather than nostalgia.

The Showtime series Penny Dreadful pulled Victorian Gothic and steampunk into the same orbit and found they belong together. Its London is full of literary monsters, Dorian Gray, Frankenstein's creature, Van Helsing's network, all operating in a world of gas lamps, surgical tools, and occult machinery. The show understood that the Victorian era's most interesting stories were always about the gap between scientific confidence and moral chaos. Season two, in particular, is one of the best runs of prestige television the genre has produced.