Born between the eighties and nineties, steampunk is an artistic and cultural movement that has Jules Verne from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and HG Wells as literary precursors. Among his masterpieces The Reality Machine (1990), by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, a novel in which the protagonist Charles Babbage in 1885 invents a mechanical computer, which works without electricity.
Steampunk ("steam" means steam, a typical power source of the industrial revolution) plays with anachronisms and technologies, imagining "what the past would be like if the future happened before." Victorian London is the favorite setting for steampunk authors, who populate the city of steam cars and computers with bronze and leather keyboards.