Unknown Genre: Writing in the Genre ("a published piece...")

For the “published piece that explains either about how to write in that Genre or how to teaching writing in that genre” part of the unknown genre project, I read “HOW TO I WRITE A STEAMPUNK STORY”  by Dru Pagliassotti on the “Steamed! Writing Steampunk Fiction” website.  

 http://ageofsteam.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/how-do-i-write-a-steampunk-story-by-dru-pagliassotti/

A lot of what the author said is kind of obvious to anyone who has read a good bit of the fiction (as I have myself by this point).   He did, however, make two very interesting points.  

One is that a Steampunk piece must have two things to be an authentic steampunk story.  One is “steam” (Victorian-era technology) and the other is “punk”, (rebellion or defiance).  If either element is missing, according to this author, then what you have is “steampulp” instead.   Somewhat like calling the “Star Wars” movies “Science Fantasy” instead of Science Fiction, one might think.  “Pulp” brings to mind images of black and white SF movies from the 50s, or the stories one might read in “Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine” in the 40s.   That’s not necessarily a bad thing, nor do we need to slice our steampunk definition so thinly in my opinion.  There is room for both “real” Steampunk and steampunk-inspired stores in my universe (both kinds of which I’ve read), and as long as they’re written well, who cares about the exact definition?  That is what I was thinking as I was reading through the article, and in fact, by the end of it, Mr. Paglassotti says pretty much the same thing. 

The other thing I want to mention is the following: Mr. Paglossotti says “The challenge is that a number of these elements have become clichés…”  something I wholeheartedly agree with.  I would think it would be very easy to write bad steampunk.  Does a pair of goggles or an airship make a genre story?   Generally, I don’t think so.  But again, it comes back to the quality of the writing: written well enough, a  pair of dusty goggles and / or a high flying balloon might just be enough.  While I write this paragraph, I think of Stanley Kim Robinson’s “Mars” series.  In one of them, (either Red Mars or Green Mars, but not Blue Mars), two of the 100 colonialists who went to Mars are traveling across the planet by dirigible doing science stuff.  While the “Mars” series is Hard SF (and very annoyingly hard SF, at that), in retrospect, that scene in the balloon travelling across the red and rock wastelands of Mars, where the red dust is getting everywhere, is very steampunk-like even though the book itself is not “steamy” at all.