While Jeter's Morlock Night and Infernal Devices, Powers' The Anubis Gates, and

Blaylock's Lord Kelvin's Machine were the first novels to which Jeter's neologis
m would be applied, the three authors gave the term little thought at the time.[
13] They were far from the first modern science fiction writers to speculate on
the development of steam-based technology or alternative histories. Keith Laumer
's Worlds of the Imperium (1962) and Ronald W. Clark's Queen Victoria's Bomb (19
67) apply modern speculation to past-age technology and society.[14] Michael Moo
rcock's Warlord of the Air (1971)[15] is another early example. Harry Harrison's
novel A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! (1973) portrays a British Empire of an al
ternative year 1973, full of atomic locomotives, coal-powered flying boats, orna
te submarines, and Victorian dialogue. In February 1980 Richard A. Lupoff and St
eve Stiles published the first "chapter" of their 10-part comic strip The Advent
ures of Professor Thintwhistle and His Incredible Aether Flyer.[16]
The first use of the word in a title was in Paul Di Filippo's 1995 Steampunk Tri
logy,[17] consisting of three short novels: "Victoria", "Hottentots", and "Walt
and Emily", which, respectively, imagine the replacement of Queen Victoria by a
human/newt clone, an invasion of Massachusetts by Lovecraftian monsters, and a l
ove affair between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.