Out of curiosity...has anyone found a really well done Steampunk novel yet? I've read several, and much as I love the concept behind the genre, I've been fairly disappointed with what I've seen so far. In most cases these stories start off with a very good premise. But they inevitably petered out and felt somewhat unfinished before the ending. A good example would be the much hyped The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist. And this is something that concerns me. Because if there ever was a sci-fi genre at risk of turning into a complete cliché, it's Steampunk. It's intrinsically a one-trick pony due to the constraints (time/technology/manners/mores) of the period it's set in. So in order to make it work - as literature - it will require a deal more creativity and effort than has been displayed so far.
When I compare most modern Steampunk to the original masters such as Jules Verne or H.G. Wells, the new stuff comes up short. And it's not like Wells or Verne were that talented a pair of literary stylists. (Their prose styles often leave much to be desired.) But they did have strong story lines and decent plot development. And that makes it easy to overlook the almost complete lack of character development, stilted dialog, and over-reliance on coincidence in their stories.
So far (to me at least) the most successful Steampunk seems to be found in short stories. I haven't seen anything I'd consider a definitive sui generis Steampunk novel comparable to what something like Gibson's Neuromancer was for cyberpunk.
Does anybody know of one? 
-40hz
Sorta the problem is that the "Original Masters" weren't writing Steampunk, they were just writing "ultra-early science fiction". The thing that I think you are touching upon is the Steampunk "Historical Knowing" by using those old cultural customs as a form of Nostalgia, with some new tech ... *but not too much*. So maybe Charles Babbage would have made some kind of awesome Weather Prognosticator Engine, or something, but the "style constraints" force it to weigh some 800 pounds and be made of "Brass, Glass, and Class."
It's the reason I'd one day like to have a Brass Keyboard, just because its sheer "wrongness" is appealing. You know, in a world of plastic everything, good ol' solid metal construction and all that. Just make sure it doesn't require 8 psi to push each key or something. We wouldn't want actual *inconveniences* messing up our idealized experience now, would we? Have we forgotten just how unrefined a lot of 19th century tech was?
I sorta think Steampunk is a nice interlude to my traditional problem with classical High Fantasy. You get World Class Wizards who can create entire tornadoes in the weather, but they then flunk miserably when faced with a wristwatch, 2nd Year Apprentice Cantrips, and a one week magic-camp with Derren Brown. (Think Predictions and Prophecies etc.) So Steampunk at least gets that Tech is Good, but it has to force itself into contortions that "can't be too good". Heck we have nice crispy computers that can calculate a Zillion flops per minute, no, Steampunk guys can't have that, too modern.
So it's another difficult genre problem.
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