The Steampunk Boiler Room

All the things Boone and Beckie have said make good sense to me. The atmosphere of a Victorian-style milieu is a necessity, I think, even if it exists on another world, entirely unrecognizable in every other way. The retro-futuristic technology aspect is central to this feel, and the characters' world-view and personalities, even their relationships to one another, are flavored by it.

The thematic aspect, where the characters react to the implications of their existence in their society, and perhaps most especially to the negative ones, i.e., pollution, the placing of human beings as cogs in the machine of industry and its de-humanizing effects, etc., is the way the stories relate to those same implications in our own world and our own societies.

Have I said anything new here? I doubt it, but these are some of the ways I'm looking at my own attempt to write the genre.

Best regards,
CeruleanSon