There exists, we are told, a particular kind of reader who has never encountered steampunk. Perhaps you are that reader — standing at the edge of a genre you have heard described in fragments (something about goggles, we believe, and corsets, and a great many gears affixed to things), wondering whether you ought to step inside.
We are here to hold the door open.
Steampunk, at its heart, imagines worlds powered by the grand contraptions of the Victorian age — steam engines, clockwork automata, magnificent airships — but set loose from the ordinary constraints of history. It is a genre that asks: What if the Industrial Revolution had taken a more interesting turn? The answers range from the whimsical to the terrifying, from the romantic to the philosophical, and very often involve dirigibles.
What follows are fourteen novels we consider ideal for the newcomer. We have selected them not merely for quality (though the quality is considerable) but for variety — because steampunk is not a single flavour but a whole confectionery, and the best way to discover which sweets suit your palate is to sample widely.
Soulless by Gail Carriger
If steampunk and a Jane Austen comedy of manners had a child — and that child was raised by werewolves and given a very sharp parasol — you would have something rather close to Soulless. Set in an alternate Victorian London where vampires, werewolves, and ghosts are fully integrated into polite society, the novel follows Alexia Tarabotti, a spinster of Italian-English descent who possesses no soul whatsoever. This condition, far from being a metaphor, is quite literal, and grants her the ability to neutralize supernatural powers with a single touch.
When Alexia accidentally kills a vampire at a party (he was terribly rude about it, attacking her in the library without so much as a proper introduction), she finds herself embroiled in a mystery involving missing vampires, a stubbornly attractive werewolf investigator, and the shadowy machinations of the British government. Carriger’s prose is intoxicatingly witty — Publishers Weekly called it a blend of “Victorian romance, screwball comedy of manners and alternate history” — and the steampunk elements are woven throughout with a light, sure touch. This is the first book in the Parasol Protectorate series, and it is a magnificent place to begin.
Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
We must confess a particular fondness for novels that reimagine history with audacious invention, and Leviathan does so with considerable panache. Set in an alternate World War I, the novel divides the warring powers into two factions: the Clankers, who build towering mechanical walkers and war machines, and the Darwinists, who have learned to fabricate living creatures — including a colossal flying whale that serves as a British airship.
The story follows two young protagonists on opposite sides of the conflict. Aleksander, the son of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, flees across Europe in a walking war machine. Deryn Sharp, a young woman who has disguised herself as a boy to serve in the British Air Service, patrols the skies aboard the great Leviathan. Their paths converge in a story that School Library Journal called “sure to become a classic.” Keith Thompson’s gorgeous illustrations bring Westerfeld’s inventions to vivid life, and the novel strikes an ideal balance between world-building and pure, propulsive adventure. It is the first in a trilogy — Behemoth and Goliath follow — and every page is a delight.
Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
Here we venture into darker territory, and we do so gladly. Boneshaker opens with a splendid catastrophe: in an alternate 1860s Seattle, a massive drilling machine called the Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine tears through the foundations of the city, releasing a subterranean gas that turns anyone who breathes it into the shambling undead. A great wall is built around the ruined district, sealing the rotters and the poison inside.
Sixteen years later, widow Briar Wilkes — whose late husband invented the infernal machine — must venture behind the wall when her teenage son goes looking for the truth about his father’s legacy. What she finds is a closed ecosystem of survivors, gas masks, air filtration, and a mysterious figure known as Dr. Minnericht who rules the walled city with an iron fist. Priest’s Seattle is richly atmospheric, her mother-son dynamic is genuinely moving, and the novel was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. If you want your steampunk with grit, danger, and the occasional zombie, this is your door.
Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve
Some ideas are so magnificently absurd that they ought not to work at all, and yet they work brilliantly. Mortal Engines presents a post-apocalyptic future in which entire cities have been mounted on enormous wheels and now roam the landscape, devouring smaller settlements for resources — a practice called Municipal Darwinism. London, naturally, is one of the largest predator cities, a tiered behemoth of metal and smoke that rumbles across the wastelands consuming everything in its path.
Young Tom Natsworthy, a third-class apprentice historian, is thrown from London after witnessing a murder attempt on the dashing archaeologist Thaddeus Valentine. Stranded on the ground with the scarred, vengeful Hester Shaw, Tom must survive the savage outland and uncover a conspiracy that threatens the entire world. Reeve writes with a wry, confident voice, and his world-building is nothing short of extraordinary — at once epic in scope and intimate in its character work. The novel won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize and spawned a beloved quartet. We consider it one of the finest entry points into steampunk for any reader.
Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding
If your ideal steampunk experience involves a crew of lovable reprobates flying a battered airship from one catastrophe to the next — and if you have ever wished Firefly had been a novel set in a world of pirates, dogfights, and sky-bound adventure — then Retribution Falls was written specifically for you.
Captain Darian Frey is a smuggler, a liar, and a man of exceedingly flexible morals. His ship, the Ketty Jay, is crewed by an assortment of misfits including a daemon-haunted navigator, an aristocratic first mate with a death wish, and a doctor who is very probably mad. When Frey accepts a seemingly simple job that turns out to be a spectacular setup, the crew must clear their names while dodging the authorities, rival pirates, and their own considerable personal baggage. The aerial dogfights are exhilarating, the banter is razor-sharp, and Wooding manages the neat trick of making you care deeply about characters who would, under other circumstances, rob you blind. This is the first of four books in the Tales of the Ketty Jay series, and each one is a roaring good time.
The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher
From the author of the beloved Dresden Files comes a steampunk epic that is, in the best sense of the word, enormous. The Aeronaut’s Windlass takes place in a world where humanity lives in vast Spires — towering habitats that reach above a hostile, mist-shrouded surface. Travel between and around the Spires is conducted by airship, powered by etheric currents and defended by crystal-powered weaponry.
Captain Francis Madison Grimm, a privateer stripped of his commission, is recruited by the Spirearch of Spire Albion for a dangerous mission when a rival Spire launches a surprise attack. He is joined by a pair of young Guard cadets, a brilliant etherialist whose genius is matched only by his eccentricity, and — we mention this because it matters — a colony of sapient cats who keep pet humans and speak in gloriously haughty dialogue. Butcher delivers sweeping action, meticulous world-building, and genuine warmth. If you enjoy fantasy with the scope of an epic and the propulsion of a thriller, this is your Spire.
Airborn by Kenneth Oppel
There are novels that make you feel as though you are flying, and Airborn is one of them. Set in an alternate world where the airplane was never invented and magnificent airships rule the skies, the novel follows Matt Cruse, a cabin boy aboard the luxury passenger vessel Aurora. Matt was practically born in the sky — his father served aboard airships before him — and he knows every rivet and gas cell of his beloved ship.
When a wealthy young woman named Kate de Vries boards the Aurora with her grandfather’s notebook full of sketches of mysterious flying creatures, Matt is drawn into an adventure involving sky pirates, uncharted islands, and a substance called hydrium that smells (delightfully and inexplicably) of mangoes. Oppel won a Printz Honor for this novel, and it reads with the breathless pace of the very best swashbuckling adventures. It is the first of a trilogy — Skybreaker and Starclimber follow — and we challenge anyone to read it without developing a passionate desire to live aboard an airship.
The Guns Above by Robyn Bennis
Military steampunk at its finest, The Guns Above introduces Captain Josette Dupre, the first woman to command an airship in the Garnian army — a promotion that a great many powerful men would very much like to see fail. To ensure that failure, a foppish aristocratic spy named Bernat is placed aboard her ship with orders to document her incompetence.
What follows is a story of aerial warfare, reluctant alliances, and sharp-tongued wit. The airship mechanics are meticulously rendered — Bennis clearly knows her way around a dirigible — and the banter between the no-nonsense Josette and the dandy Bernat is one of the novel’s great pleasures. The action sequences are cinematic and tense, and the book manages to explore questions of gender, competence, and institutional prejudice without ever losing its sense of fun. Fans of Patrick O’Brian and Lois McMaster Bujold will find much to love here.
Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare
For readers who like their steampunk laced with magic, mystery, and a touch of romance, Clockwork Angel offers an irresistible combination. Set in Victorian London, the novel follows Tessa Gray, a young American who travels to England to find her missing brother and instead discovers that she possesses a terrifying supernatural ability: the power to transform into any person, living or dead.
Rescued from the sinister Dark Sisters by the Shadowhunters — an ancient order of warriors who protect humanity from demons — Tessa is drawn into a world of clockwork automatons, secret societies, and dangerous political machinations. The clockwork army is genuinely chilling, and the two Shadowhunter leads, the brooding Will Herondale and the gentle Jem Carstairs, provide a romantic tension that never overwhelms the adventure. This is the first book in The Infernal Devices trilogy, a prequel to Clare’s enormously popular Mortal Instruments series, and it stands beautifully on its own.
Lady of Devices by Shelley Adina
In 1889, Lady Claire Trevelyan is expected to do precisely one thing with her life: secure a wealthy husband. Unfortunately, her talents lie not in the ballroom but in the laboratory, where she has developed a rather alarming aptitude for making things explode. When her father gambles away the family fortune on an ill-advised investment in the combustion engine (everyone knows the world runs on steam), Claire finds herself penniless and alone on the streets of London with nothing but her steam-powered landau and her second-best hat.
What follows is a transformation that is both thrilling and deeply satisfying. Claire uses her engineering brilliance to survive, gathering a band of street children under her protection and building a new life from the wreckage of the old. Adina’s writing captures the cadence and sensibility of Victorian London with evident affection, and Claire is a heroine who earns every triumph through wit, resourcefulness, and sheer refusal to accept the limitations the world has placed upon her. This is the first book in the Magnificent Devices series, and it has earned a devoted following for very good reason.
The Iron Duke by Meljean Brook
We would be remiss if we did not include steampunk romance on this list, for the two genres entwine as naturally as copper wire around a Tesla coil. The Iron Duke is set in an alternate history where England spent two centuries under the brutal rule of the Horde, a Mongol-descended empire that controlled the population through nanotechnology implanted in their blood. When the Iron Duke — the national hero Rhys Trahaearn — freed England from the Horde’s control, he became the most celebrated (and most feared) man in the nation.
Now Inspector Mina Wentworth of the Metropolitan Police finds a body on the Iron Duke’s doorstep, and the resulting investigation draws them both into a conspiracy that reaches across oceans. Brook’s worldbuilding is astonishingly detailed, the mystery is genuinely compelling, and the romance between the imposing Rhys and the steely, self-possessed Mina crackles with tension. Jayne Ann Krentz praised the book for having “brilliantly defined the new genre of Steampunk Romance,” and we are inclined to agree. This is the first book in the Iron Seas series.
The Black God’s Drums by P. Djèlí Clark
A jewel of a novella — brief, brilliant, and utterly original. The Black God’s Drums is set in a steampunk alternate history where the American Civil War stalled into an uneasy truce and New Orleans became a free city-state, a neutral ground where airships dock alongside steamships and Creole culture thrives in a swirl of languages, cuisines, and competing loyalties.
Our guide through this extraordinary world is Creeper, a street-smart young woman who lives in the rafters of a cathedral and carries within her the voice of Oya, a Yoruba goddess of storms. When Creeper learns of a Confederate plot to weaponize a devastating supernatural power, she must seek passage aboard the airship of the formidable Captain Ann-Marie, a smuggler and freedom fighter with secrets of her own. Clark’s prose is lush and propulsive, his alternate history is inventive and thoughtful, and the novella was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. At just over a hundred pages, it is a perfect afternoon’s reading — and a doorway into one of the most imaginative steampunk worlds we have encountered.
The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
We arrive now at one of the genre’s foundational texts. The Difference Engine asks a deceptively simple question: What if Charles Babbage had actually succeeded in building his mechanical computer in the 1820s? In Gibson and Sterling’s alternate 1855, the answer is a world transformed — an Industrial Radical Party governs Britain under Prime Minister Lord Byron, steam-driven computing engines have accelerated the Information Age by more than a century, and a new class of “clackers” (hackers, essentially) manipulates data for profit and political advantage.
The novel follows three protagonists — a politician’s courtesan, a paleontologist, and a journalist — through a London that is at once recognisably Victorian and startlingly futuristic. This is not the easiest novel on our list; Gibson and Sterling wrote it as a series of interconnected narratives rather than a straightforward plot, and its pleasures are more intellectual than visceral. But its influence on the genre is immeasurable, and for readers who enjoy the intersection of technology, history, and speculative thought, it remains essential reading.
Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft
We conclude our list with a novel that demonstrates, in the most magnificent fashion, that steampunk is capable of great literary ambition without sacrificing a single ounce of adventure. Senlin Ascends introduces us to Thomas Senlin, a mild-mannered headmaster from a quiet coastal village who brings his new bride, Marya, to the legendary Tower of Babel for their honeymoon. Within moments of entering the Tower’s magnificent and chaotic ground floor, they are separated — and what follows is Senlin’s increasingly desperate, increasingly transformative journey upward through the Tower’s ringdoms, each a self-contained civilisation with its own culture, economy, and terrors.
The Tower itself is a marvel of steampunk invention: a vast, impossible structure where airships dock at ports carved into its exterior, steam engines power the machinery of a hundred strange societies, and mechanical wonders await around every spiralling corner. Senlin, once bookish and cautious, must become cunning, resourceful, and braver than he ever imagined as he navigates con artists, petty tyrants, and theatrical revolutionaries in his search for the woman he loves. Publishers Weekly gave the novel a starred review, calling it a “brilliant debut,” and it has since become one of the most celebrated fantasy novels of the past decade. It is the first of four books in the completed Books of Babel series — and we confess that, having opened the door to the Tower, we found it quite impossible to leave until we had climbed every last ringdom.
There you have it — fourteen doors into the world of steampunk, each leading somewhere wonderfully different. Whether you prefer your adventures served with tea and witty repartee or grease and gunpowder, whether you want romance or horror or military precision or sheer unbridled imagination, there is a novel on this list that will suit you perfectly.
We suggest you begin with whichever description made your heart beat a little faster. That is always the wisest way to choose a book.
