Dieselpunk
Also known as diesel punk
A retrofuturist genre built on the machines and style of roughly 1918 to the early 1950s, such as airships, diesel engines, Art Deco cities and noir shadows, pushed further than history went.
- Steampunk
- A brass airship chases a hansom cab through gaslit fog.
- Dieselpunk
- A propeller fighter chases a sedan between Art Deco towers.
In practice
Dieselpunk is a retrofuturist genre and aesthetic built on the technology and look of the years between the First World War and the early 1950s: diesel engines, airships, propeller fighters, radio serials, Art Deco skyscrapers and the shadows of film noir. It imagines that era running further, faster or stranger than it did, usually with a darker political edge than the Victorian optimism of steampunk.
The name was coined in 2001 by the game designer Lewis Pollak to describe his tabletop role-playing game Children of the Sun, following the pattern of cyberpunk and steampunk. The look is much older than the word: Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), wartime posters, pulp magazines and the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials of the 1930s are the sources dieselpunk borrows from.
Typical stories involve rocket packs and super-weapons, flying aircraft carriers, mad scientists working for totalitarian regimes, square-jawed pilots and private detectives in a city of chrome and smoke. Some works play it as pulp adventure, some as an alternate history in which the war went differently, and some as a grim, mechanized dystopia.
Dieselpunk on the page
EXT. SKY CARRIER RESOLUTE - FLIGHT DECK - DAWN
A riveted steel deck the size of a city block hangs above the clouds, held aloft by four roaring propeller towers. A battered fighter plane slams down, catches the wire and smokes to a halt. CAPTAIN ROSA VEGA (30s), leather jacket, goggles pushed up, climbs out.
DECK CHIEF
You brought back half an engine.
VEGA
I brought back the half with the Ministry's codebook in it.
Behind her a searchlight sweeps the clouds. Somewhere below, a radio crackles with a marching song.
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Every detail points to the interwar machine age rather than to Victorian brass or the far future: rivets, propellers, an arrester wire, leather and goggles, a Ministry and a marching song on the radio. The flying carrier is the dieselpunk move, taking real 1930s technology one impossible step further. The dialogue stays clipped and pulpy, in the voice of the adventure serials the genre loves.
Dieselpunk examples in film, games and comics
Film: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), shot almost entirely against blue screen, is the purest example, with giant robots marching on 1939 New York. The Rocketeer (1991), Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Hellboy (2004) and the moon-base comedy Iron Sky (2012) all draw on the style, and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) is its acknowledged ancestor.
Animation and games: Hayao Miyazaki's Porco Rosso (1992), about seaplane pilots over the Adriatic in the 1920s, is often cited, along with the mechanized alternate history of the Wolfenstein games, the Art Deco undersea city of BioShock (2007), founded in 1946 but played in 1960 and so on the border with atompunk, and Iron Harvest (2020), built on Jakub Różalski's paintings of giant walking machines in 1920s farmland.
Comics and books: Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics, with their occult Nazi science, and Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy (2009–2011), an alternate First World War of walking war machines, are standard reading, alongside the pulp-revival anthologies that use the label on their covers.
Dieselpunk vs. steampunk, atompunk and cyberpunk
The punks are named after their technology and their era. Steampunk draws on the Victorian and Edwardian age of steam, brass and clockwork; dieselpunk on the interwar and Second World War years of oil, steel and propellers; atompunk on the 1950s and early 1960s atomic age of chrome, ray guns and suburban futurism, the world of the Fallout games; and cyberpunk on a near future of computers, networks and corporations.
The moods differ as much as the gadgets. Steampunk tends toward invention and adventure, while dieselpunk inherits its era's mass politics, total war and noir cynicism. A quick test: if the hero wears a top hat and the city runs on coal, it is steampunk; if the hero wears a flight jacket and the city has searchlights, it is dieselpunk.
The dieselpunk aesthetic
The visual signs are consistent: riveted steel, heavy machines, streamlined trains and cars, propellers and airships, Art Deco architecture, propaganda posters, monochrome or sepia palettes, searchlights and fog, and clothing of the 1930s and 1940s such as trench coats, fedoras, flight jackets and uniforms. The soundtrack comes from swing, jazz, crooners and newsreel marches.
Fans often divide the style into two strands. One is hopeful and swashbuckling, in love with the era's adventure serials and their aviators and rocket men. The other is darker, imagining a world that never escaped the war or the dictatorships, and sits closer to noir and dystopia. Many stories borrow from both, using pulp heroics to fight a grim regime.
How to write a dieselpunk story
Start from a real date and change one thing. The strongest dieselpunk worlds know their history and then bend it: a war that never ended, an airship industry that beat the jet, a city that kept building upward through the Depression. The more precise the period detail, the more the invention stands out.
Let the machines carry the theme. Diesel-era technology is loud, heavy and built for mass production and war, so it suits stories about power, propaganda and the individual against the machine. Give the hero a personal machine, a plane, a car or an armored suit, and treat it as a character.
On the page, establish the world through texture and sound rather than explanation: rivets, engine roar, radio static, a poster on a wall. A screenplay has a few lines of action to set the look, so choose the two or three details that tell the reader which decade has been bent and how.
Common questions
What is dieselpunk?
A retrofuturist genre and aesthetic based on the technology and style of roughly 1918 to the early 1950s, such as diesel engines, airships, Art Deco cities and film noir, imagined further or stranger than they really were.
What is the difference between dieselpunk and steampunk?
Steampunk draws on the Victorian age of steam and brass; dieselpunk on the interwar and Second World War era of oil, steel and propellers. Dieselpunk usually has a darker, more political tone.
What are some examples of dieselpunk?
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The Rocketeer, Captain America: The First Avenger, Iron Sky, Porco Rosso and the Wolfenstein games are often cited, with Metropolis as the genre's ancestor.
Who coined the term dieselpunk?
The game designer Lewis Pollak, in 2001, to describe his tabletop role-playing game Children of the Sun. The look it names is decades older.
Is Fallout dieselpunk?
Mostly not. Fallout's retro future comes from the 1950s atomic age, so it is usually called atompunk, although its power armor and wartime propaganda overlap with dieselpunk.
What era is dieselpunk based on?
Roughly the end of the First World War to the early 1950s, with the 1930s and the Second World War at its center.
Is dieselpunk science fiction?
It is usually treated as a subgenre of science fiction or speculative fiction, often combined with alternate history, pulp adventure or noir.