Just Anachronistic Technology, or Something More Subtle

Steampunk.
 
The term seems to mean a lot of different things, when I've delved in deep. Some swear by the etymology, but there are some settings that attract that Steampunk name that ignore steam power, and frankly I don't mind if they do. Trying to shoehorn a specific thing into a setting just because it will lose the general label seems like an exercise in pleasing the pedantic. Argh, stupid genre fascinations!
 
Anyway, I tend to think of Steampunk as more AnachroPunk or something. Anachronistic touches to a world that is in some way more recognizable than it should be. Some things ahead, some things behind, alien but identifiable.
 
A writer said, and I'm sorry I don't remember who, that Steampunk as a genre has nothing to offer. Unlike science fiction in general, which is relatively unrestrained, and fantasy, which in the broader sense of the term is completely unrestrained, Steampunk has almost a fetishistic obsession with the specific, without a broader statement on society. It's all aesthetic and no substance, this person said.
 
I think you could probably expand this sentiment to the surface any genre (including literary fiction); it's just that other genres have had a longer time to flower. You do have themes which are ripe for deeper statements, such as an indirect comment on our world's dependency on mechanization, or, if you focus on the Victorian era style of Steampunk, our blindness to our own colonialist tendencies.
 
I have to say, I love it. It is, at its base I think, a merger of fantasy and science fiction that puts a rusty patina on technology, making it fit better into a world than having, say, magic and futuristic technology side-by-side (Shadowrun comes to mind as being a setting trying to do too many things at once). If Arcanum had been more future tech and less anachronistic tech, I don't think it would have been nearly as intriguing a world to explore (for as long as I managed, at least). There is also often a genteel old-worldness which disarms us, assuming it's not overdone, so that we're less likely to over-analyze people's behavior and accept that they're acting under some sort of cultural imperative that we don't quite understand (even though we may find that we understand it once the story's done).
 
But as far as the deeper issues, this person may be right, that there hasn't, at least yet, been much insight into what these sorts of themes add, if anything.  Well, the more I think about this short film, the more I think there MAY be more potential than this person allowed. The themes are not new, and perhaps still not deep enough by themselves, but I don't think it would have had quite the same impact had it been set in a setting other than steampunk:
 
Take a look.