Steampunk takes the Victorian age and gives it more steam, more brass and far more airships. This steampunk name generator names characters with a proper title, airships, improbable inventions and the ironworks and learned societies behind them.
Where steampunk comes from
Steampunk is the Victorian age with more steam, more brass and far more airships, and the word was a joke.
- The name: the writer K. W. Jeter coined it in a 1987 letter to the science fiction magazine Locus, as a play on cyberpunk, for Victorian fantasies he and his friends were writing.
- The roots are older: Jules Verne's submarines and H. G. Wells's time machine were science fiction written in the age of steam.
- The look of goggles, gears and top hats grew up in fashion and art from the 2000s.
Naming steampunk things
- Characters get grand Victorian first names, a profession and an industrial surname: Professor Thaddeus Brassworth, Inspector Archibald Hackett.
- Airships get ship prefixes. HMA, "His Majesty's Airship", was a real prefix for early British airships; SS is the steamship's.
- Inventions are patented, as real Victorian ones were: Pennyfeather's Patent Aetheric Kettle.
- Companies and societies are proud and long-winded, as Victorian firms liked to be.
Famous names like Phileas Fogg and Captain Nemo, and real inventors like Tesla and Lovelace, are left out. For real Victorian names, try the Victorian Name Generator, and for other ships, the Spaceship Name Generator.
For the rest of the future, see all the sci-fi name generators.