So, What is Steampunk? Cont'd

To finish up on settings- I don't know if this will help further in describing the difference between steampunk, clockpunk, and cyberpunk, but here it goes: My quick and dirty guide to distinctions in setting:
If a fantastic garden of singing plants appeared in your backyard, and it was caused by Victorian fairies only visible using special crystal lenses and you devised cases of leather, brass and the crystal to catch them= steampunk.
If the fairies in question are gnomes using wound-up (but still magical) devices to power their garden, which is part of a giant and wholly automated astrogation device that uses nothing more advanced than a simple toothed escapement, and you catch them in a spring trap= clockpunk.
If the fairies are, in fact, an alien species and the garden is one of their artifacts, and you catch them with a vacuum cleaner and wear black goggles to see the radioactive exudia of their skin because they look normal= cyberpunk, especially if you get onto their ship and off of 21st century Earth.

Far more important than the stylistic elements (which sometimes have more bearing on illustrations than on the plot itself) are the themes of the same period that steampunk purports to take place in- that is, Regency-Victorian themes. These themes are the quintessence of steampunk, especially since the literature is an often-idealized version the Victorian era.

Gothic horror stories and the English Decadence of Wilde are particularly evocative of the genre, as are more "brainy" works such as Conan Doyle. Of course, Edgar Allen Poe was also influenced by Gothic-Romantic themes. In fact, his short story The Man That Was Used Up is recommended to people who want to write an effective steampunk suspense story with the majority of the “steam” well-hidden until the end. Be warned: you might have a hard time sleeping afterwards. Of course, part of the reason this story is recommended is because it implicitly deals with a common theme that should be treated in some manner: scientific and moral law called into question. Is it right to keep a man alive beyond the use of any of his natural organs and limbs, as in the case of Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith?
This is one of the problematic questions; other similar ones are raised or grappled with in towering classics like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. For another example of Gothic horror sans science fiction, try George Eliot's The Lifted Veil, which also deals with forbidden knowledge and moral dilemma.

Without generalizing too much (and I have generalized a lot, especially in my first post) we can say that an earnest question to ask in dramatic steampunk is this: Is it right to defy natural law, and under what conditions will a man of sufficient genius attempt to usurp nature and Providence? For the idea of a natural order and Providence needs to be omnipresent in the story- there is the center of conflict. There must be rules before there can be any rule-defying.