Differences from steampunk Īuthor Scott Westerfeld addresses the question of where to draw the line between steampunk and dieselpunk, arguing that his novel Leviathan (2009) qualifies as steampunk despite the fact that the technology it depicts includes diesel engines: The term also refers to the tongue-in-cheek name given to a similar cyberpunk derivative, ' steampunk,' which focuses on science fiction based on industrial steam power and which is often set within the Victorian era. The '-punk' suffix attached to the name is representative of the counterculture nature of the genre with regard to its opposition to contemporary aesthetics. The name 'dieselpunk' is a derivative of the science fiction subgenre cyberpunk, and represents the time period from World War I until the 1950s, when diesel-based locomotion was the main technological focus of Western culture.
