All three genres love the 19th century, candlelight and secrets. Booksellers mix them up constantly. Here is a quick way to tell them apart.
| Steampunk | Gaslamp fantasy | Gothic | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core ingredient | Retro-futuristic technology | Magic in a historical setting | Dread, secrets and decay |
| Typical setting | Alternate Victorian city, airships | Victorian/Edwardian society | Isolated castle or old house |
| Mood | Adventurous, inventive | Mannered, wondrous | Claustrophobic, uncanny |
| The supernatural | Optional | Essential | Ambiguous — real or imagined? |
| Founding texts | Verne, Wells | Dickens's ghost stories, fairy literature | Walpole, Radcliffe, Shelley, Stoker |
Steampunk: the machine
If the story's wonders are machines — automatons, analytical engines, steam-powered limbs — it is steampunk. The technology is the fantasy element, and it usually changes society: a world with airships has different wars, different trade and different heroes.
Altered Carbon
Richard K. Morgan
The Windup Girl
Paolo Bacigalupi
The Austere Academy
Lemony Snicket, Brett Helquist
The Slippery Slope
Lemony Snicket, Brett Helquist
Gaslamp fantasy: the magic
Keep the setting, remove the gears, add magic. Gaslamp fantasy is the Victorian novel of manners with sorcerers at the ball. The tension is often between enchantment and propriety: what happens when a well-brought-up young lady can raise the dead?
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
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A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
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The Time Machine
H. G. Wells
Howl's Moving Castle
Diana Wynne Jones
Gothic: the dread
Gothic fiction is defined by feeling, not technology or magic. A heroine trapped in a crumbling house; a family secret; a presence that might be a ghost or might be madness. Gothic novels can be set in any century — the 18th-century originals were usually set in a medieval or Catholic past that felt exotic to English readers.
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Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
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Dracula
Bram Stoker
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Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
Mary Shelley
Where they overlap
Plenty of books sit on the borders. A steampunk novel with a haunted airship is gothic steampunk; a gaslamp fantasy about a cursed family estate is gothic too. Use the genre that describes the book's engine — what drives the plot — and the rest as seasoning.