My vision of a Steampunk World

It's been a couple of months since my last post, all due to a large influx of schoolwork for a new semester. Happily enough though, I'll be continuing my interest in this subject for a final project of one my classes.

In the course of one month, I'm going to try to imagine all of the facets of living in a futuristic Victorian-steampunked universe, and illustrate them.

A Glimpse of the Neo-Steampunk Future

Following the global economic collapse that marked the end of oil-based goods production in 2075, the world as we know it changed forever. With the depletion of oil certain and complete, and global warming having sufficiently acted upon on the ice caps and subsequently, sea levels, the world was forced to turn to an energy source that had not only been there all along, but had slowly invaded their lives.

The people of earth, in the face of depression, poverty, and an increasingly primitive communal existence stemming from the lack of oil-based commodities, were forced to make use of water, the only available resource in many areas, to power their daily lives.

Having inherited a harsh lesson from their wasteful ancestors, the people of the neodepression vowed to never again forsake forethought in exchange for a carefree, gluttonous existence.

Over the course of another generation, the people built their lives anew. The industry of water slowly bloomed; from hydro-electric plants to the hydro-conversion automotive industry to hydroponic plastics, water, for the first time since the agricultural revolution, once again became the lifeblood of the global economy. The Age of Oil had seen its close, and the Age of Steam was reborn.

With the New Age of Steam came a resurgence in interest in the Victorian way, when hydro-power had last been highly valued. These centuries-old ideas merged with the post-neodepression popular culture and became known as "NeeStee," slang vernacular for Neo-Steampunk.

The concept of NeeStee in one way or the other influenced fashion, architecture, and interior design of the new post-neodepression generation.

A large part of the concept involved salvage, due to the vast graveyards of non-biodegradable tokens of yesteryear. Thanks to disposal-based-mindset of the previous generations, these junkyards had slowly grown over the last century and now littered the continents, forlorn and unmoving, sometimes for miles in every direction. The end of oil-based production brought about a commodity crisis which in turn brought about not only a scramble for a new power source, but also a valuable market for scrap goods.

These scrap goods and materials allowed for the neodepression generation to maintain some semblance of modern existance, and even when the hydro-commodities that sprang up years later rendered this kind of living non-essential, the post-neodepression generation, instilled with the conservational spirit of their parents, found ways to incorporate it into their everyday lives.