Steampunk and the Hero’s Journey and Heroine’s Journey

by | Culture

Culture

Gears Out of Time: Steampunk, the Incongruent Anachronism, and the Hero and Heroine’s Journey

The clock is always wrong in a steampunk world. That is precisely the point.

There is a particular, peculiar pleasure in things that belong to different times occupying the same space. A brass telescope on a digital desk. A corset laced with circuitry. A dirigible trailing telegraph wire through a sky that has not yet imagined the airplane. This is the delicious, disorienting, deliberately discordant heart of steampunk — a genre built not merely on Victorian aesthetics and ambitious anachronism, but on the fundamental philosophical proposition that the wrong things in the wrong time can illuminate the right truths about the human condition.

And at the center of every steampunk story worth its weight in riveted copper and reconfigured clockwork, there is always a character who does not belong. Not merely to their narrative world, but to themselves. An inventor whose mind runs on tomorrow’s frequencies in yesterday’s city. A woman whose interior sovereignty is centuries ahead of the corset-cinched culture that surrounds her. A scientist whose hunger for knowledge ruptures the polite taxonomies of a society built on gas-lamps and gentility. The incongruent anachronism protagonist — the being who is fundamentally, structurally, gloriously out of time — is not a quirk of the steampunk genre. They are its very engine.

What drives that engine, what gives it mythological momentum and narrative inevitability, is something older than steam and older than story: the eternal arc of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, and its equally profound, profoundly different counterpart — Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey. These twin maps of the interior life, applied to speculative fiction’s most wonderfully wrongheaded genre, reveal something astonishing: steampunk is not escapism dressed in Victorian finery. It is psychological cartography in brass and bone.

The Wrong Clock in the Right Story: What Anachronism Does to a Hero

Campbell, drawing from Carl Jung’s architecture of the collective unconscious, described the Hero’s Journey — the monomyth — as the universal pattern beneath every story humans have ever told themselves. Departure. Initiation. Return. The ordinary world disrupted. The threshold crossed. The ordeal endured. The boon earned. The self transformed.

But what makes steampunk’s iteration of this journey so electrically specific is the nature of the ordinary world its protagonists inhabit. In steampunk, the ordinary world is never ordinary — it is a world in structural conflict with itself, a world where yesterday’s society strains and groans under the pressure of tomorrow’s machines. The steampunk world is always almost right and therefore profoundly, permanently wrong. And into this almost-world, the incongruent anachronism protagonist arrives already carrying their own version of that same almost-rightness — a mind, a morality, a manner of moving through reality that is simultaneously too early and too late for the world in which they’ve been placed.

This is not accidental. This is myth. When the world and the hero are both out of time in the same direction, the journey becomes not merely external adventure but existential alignment — the long, grinding, gorgeous work of bringing the self and the world into the same century at the same moment. No other genre does this with quite the same spectacular, steam-pressured intensity.

The Difference Engine: The Hero as Disruptive Calculation

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s foundational 1990 novel The Difference Engine — set in an alternate Victorian England where Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine was actually built, thus precipitating a computational revolution a century and a half before its historical moment — is, in its deepest structural bones, a Hero’s Journey told from the inside of a fractured reality.

The novel’s protagonists move through a Britain that is simultaneously recognizable and radically wrong: a meritocracy governed by information rather than blood, a surveillance state built of punch-cards and data, a society in which the machines have arrived before humanity has developed the philosophy to absorb them. The protagonists themselves are variants of the archetypal Scientist-Hero — the polymath, the inventor, the dissident intellectual — each of them carrying knowledge and capability that the world around them cannot yet fully accommodate.

This is the purest expression of the anachronism protagonist’s Campbellian dilemma: the Call to Adventure is not merely a single disruption but a systemic one. The threshold is not a forest or a foreign land but an entire epistemic order. The ordeal is not a monster in a cave but the slow, terrifying realization that the future has already arrived — and the world, and the self, must either catch up or be crushed. The boon, when it comes, is not a grail or a golden fleece but something more modern and more chilling: information itself, and the terrible power of those who possess it.

Gibson and Sterling, in their dense, demanding, gloriously strange collaboration, understood instinctively what Campbell mapped mythologically: the Hero does not merely change in the course of the journey. The Hero recalibrates — synchronizes the interior clock with the exterior world, or fails, forever displaced, forever a ghost in the machine of their own time.

Perdido Street Station: The Hero Who Cannot Return

If The Difference Engine is a Hero’s Journey of systemic disruption, China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station — that magnificent, monstrous, multiply-award-winning achievement of 2000 — is the Hero’s Journey pressed to its darkest, most uncompromising extreme: the journey from which the hero returns irrevocably altered, carrying not triumph but terrible knowledge.

Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, Miéville’s dissident scientist-protagonist navigating the sprawling, steam-and-sorcery industrial nightmare of New Crobuzon, is the incongruent anachronism made flesh and failure. He is too curious for his culture, too transgressive for his time — his love for the khepri artist Lin transgresses species as well as class, his science transgresses institutional orthodoxy, his politics transgress every power structure the city’s corrupt government has so carefully, so cruelly constructed. He is, in Campbellian terms, a Hero before the Call has even arrived: a man already living in the Belly of the Whale by virtue of simply being who he is.

When the Call comes — in the form of a wingless garuda who needs his flight restored — Isaac crosses the threshold not into a new world but into a deeper layer of the world he already inhabits, peeling back New Crobuzon’s brass-and-shadow surface to reveal the monstrous, moth-winged horror beneath. His Ordeal is collective catastrophe. His Allies fall. His Mentor is absent. And when he finally returns — if return it can be called — he returns not with the boon of wisdom cleanly earned but with the wound of wisdom wrested: the knowledge that the city survives, that justice does not, and that the journey has permanently displaced him from the ordinary world he can never again call home.

Miéville’s genius is to honor the mythological structure while refusing its consolations. The steampunk world of New Crobuzon is too broken, too beautiful, too brutally specific to permit the Hero a tidy return. And in that refusal, the novel achieves something Campbell understood at the deepest level: the journey changes not just the hero, but the reader’s understanding of what heroism costs.

Penny Dreadful: The Heroine’s Journey Through Gaslamp and God

Maureen Murdock — a Jungian psychotherapist and once a student of Campbell’s — developed the Heroine’s Journey in direct response to her mentor’s famous dismissal: “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological tradition, the woman is there. All she has to do is to realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.” Murdock’s model describes a radically different arc: one that begins not with a Call to Adventure but with a separation from the feminine self — an embrace of the dominant masculine culture’s values in order to survive it — followed by apparent success, inner desolation, spiritual crisis, and the long, luminous, difficult work of reclaiming wholeness.

No character in contemporary steampunk television embodies this arc more fully, more ferociously, or more heartbreakingly than Vanessa Ives in Showtime’s Penny Dreadful (2014–2016) — Eva Green’s towering, terrifying, transcendent performance in what remains one of the finest and most psychologically daring steampunk narratives ever committed to screen.

Vanessa’s world — Victorian London at the collision of industrial progress and supernatural darkness — is itself a Murdockian landscape: a world that demands its women perform conventional femininity while offering them no protection from the horrors that conventional femininity cannot survive. Vanessa’s journey begins with a catastrophic separation: from faith, from friendship, from the feminine community that might have sustained her. She spends much of the series attempting to master, on masculine terms, the supernatural force that pursues her — exorcism, combat, occult scholarship, the company of damaged and dangerous men. She achieves spectacular victories. She earns spectacular suffering.

The Heroine’s Journey’s most shattering stage is the one Murdock calls the descent into the abyss — the moment when the masculine tools fail, the false success collapses, and the heroine must go down rather than forward, inward rather than outward. Vanessa’s descent is the series’ most extraordinary sustained achievement: a woman of fierce intelligence and ferocious faith, brought to the edge of erasure not by the monsters outside her but by the war within. Her ultimate arc — the choice she makes in the devastating final episode — is, in Murdockian terms, the Heroine’s fullest expression: not victory on the world’s terms, but wholeness on her own.

For writers of speculative fiction, Vanessa Ives is a masterclass. She is the anachronism protagonist as Heroine: a woman whose interior life is centuries ahead of the world that would contain her, whose journey is not the Hero’s outward arc of conquest and return, but the Heroine’s downward arc of descent, dismantling, and terrible, hard-won integration.

The Nevers: The Heroine’s Journey Doubled, Divided, and Dynamo-Powered

Where Penny Dreadful maps Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey through a single, singular consciousness, HBO’s The Nevers (2021–2023) performs something more structurally audacious: it doubles, divides, and distributes the Heroine’s Journey across a community of Victorian women who have been involuntarily gifted — touched — with supernatural abilities in a London that views their powers alternately as abomination, curiosity, and threat.

Amalia True and Penance Adair — the fierce, fractured fighter and the brilliant, buoyant inventor who form the series’ central dyad — are not merely two characters. They are two phases of the same Heroine’s Journey, embodied simultaneously. Amalia, haunted, forceful, forward-moving at any cost, is the Heroine in the masculine-identified, battle-hardened stage of Murdock’s journey — effective, formidable, and profoundly estranged from her own interior truth. Penance, incandescent with invention, warm with community, building clockwork devices that reimagine what the world might become, is the Heroine beginning to reclaim the feminine principle — the creative, connective, communal self that the dominant culture has always undervalued.

Together, these two women navigate a world that is steampunk in its truest, most philosophically precise sense: a world technologically ahead of its moral development, a world where the machines arrive before the ethics that might govern them, a world of magnificent material possibility haunted by the spiritual stagnation of a society that cannot imagine what women, and the excluded, and the marked, might build if given the instruments and the freedom. Penance’s gadgets and gizmos are not merely aesthetic delights — they are Heroine’s Journey artifacts: physical expressions of the creative, feminine intelligence reclaiming its place in a world that has spent centuries trying to make it invisible.

What the Clockwork Teaches: Lessons for Writers of Speculative Fiction

The incongruent anachronism protagonist — that gorgeous, geared misfit who is always the wrong person in the wrong time in the right story — offers speculative fiction writers a constellation of craft lessons as precisely engineered as any steampunk mechanism.

Build your protagonist’s anachronism as moral argument, not mere aesthetic. The anachronism protagonist is not out of time because it looks interesting in goggles. They are out of time because they know something the world does not yet know, or are something the world cannot yet accommodate. Define the specific nature of their temporal displacement — the precise way their interior life is ahead of or behind the culture surrounding them — and you define the engine of your entire story.

Choose your journey architecture deliberately. The Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Journey produce profoundly different narrative shapes, different emotional textures, different kinds of resolution. The Hero’s Journey is linear, outward, and climactic; it builds toward a decisive confrontation and a return bearing boons. The Heroine’s Journey is circular, inward, and integrative; it spirals through success and failure toward a wholeness that replaces triumph. Both are available in steampunk — but they are not interchangeable, and confusing them produces stories that satisfy neither archetype.

Let the world’s anachronism mirror the protagonist’s. The steampunk world is, by definition, a temporal paradox — a world in which different centuries coexist in uncomfortable, generative friction. The most powerful steampunk protagonists are those whose personal anachronism mirrors the cultural one: their interiority is out of joint with their exterior in the same direction that the world’s technology is out of joint with its morality. This parallelism creates resonance that a reader feels before they can articulate it.

Honor the cost. Both Campbell’s monomyth and Murdock’s heroine’s arc insist on transformation — and transformation always costs something. The steampunk world, with its industrial weight and Victorian class rigidity, is a world that extracts enormous tolls from those who try to move through it on their own terms. Let your protagonist pay that toll. Let the journey mark them. Let the gears grind. The reader will feel the weight of the change far more deeply if the change was never free.

Remember that the return is never truly a return. The final lesson of both journey architectures, and the final lesson of steampunk as a genre, is that you cannot go home again — not when home was the world before you knew what you know. Vanessa Ives cannot return to faith as she found it. Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin cannot return to a New Crobuzon that has not been monstrous. The anachronism protagonist, having made their journey, is permanently displaced — not homeless, but inhabiting a new temporal coordinate entirely: the present moment, hard-won, where the interior clock and the exterior world finally, briefly, imperfectly align.

The gears turn. The clock is still wrong. The journey, endlessly, continues.

Sources Cited:

 

Campbell’s Hero’s Journey

 

Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey

Articles: The Heroine’s Journey

Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey Arc

The Heroine’s Journey: Examples, Archetypes, and Infographic

 

Steampunk

Why You Need to Read Steampunk: The Most Underrated Genre

The Difference Engine — Gibson & Sterling

 

Perdido Street Station — China Miéville

 

Penny Dreadful

 

The Nevers

 

Carnival Row — Steampunk & Victorian Context

Carnival Row Is a Surprisingly Complex Take on Victorian Fantasy Tropes, Race, and Politics

7 Best Steampunk TV Shows Of All Time

Primary Sources