Can anyone help me define Steampunk?

..yeah sure I'd be happy to help out with this definition - steampunk is when you put all four surviving members of the Sex Pistols into a sauna ..and lock the door!

Basically as I understand it steam punk can be any period as long as the highest level of technology is clockwork / steam. Many base it in Victorian age as it was our Steam period. Thats what I know it as anyway.

It is difficult to pin down any speculative fiction genre and say, this is it. I can't remember who it was who said it, but it went along the lines that 'science fiction is what I point at and say, science fiction'. Steampunk has an alternative universe setting, rooted in societies that are only just coming into a mechanised structure, usually Victorian with Babbage and the computer, or devices from the fathers of science fiction, H G Wells and Jules Verne.

Probably a search through google, maybe wiki will have better info, but probably not definitive.

When I think steampunk I think, gears and clockwork. But also an age of innovation and invention. Taking what you had and making it work together.

And steam power too. I think it isn't really something you can verbally define. I find pictures work better, that way people can see.

I too love steampunk and always have a hard time defining it to people who don't already know what it is.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.