Beyond the Bestseller List: Steampunk Books, Web Fiction, YouTube and Games Worth Your Time

Every steampunk media list on the internet recommends the same six novels. You already know them. You’ve probably already read them. This isn’t that list.

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Turns out it was steampunk all along, and once you’re a few years into this hobby, the “top 10 steampunk books” roundups stop being useful. You’ve read the staples. What you actually want is the next layer down: the web fiction nobody’s turned into a listicle yet, the YouTube creators actually building things, the games that get the aesthetic right instead of slapping a few gears on a UI and calling it done.

This is meant to be a hub, not a final word. I’ll come back and dig deeper into specific picks in future posts (starting with whichever section gets the most requests), so treat this as the starting map rather than the whole territory. If you want the origin story for why this blog exists at all, I wrote about that here.

📖 The Books Worth Reading After You’ve Read the Obvious Ones

The staples exist for a reason, so a quick acknowledgment before moving past them: if you haven’t read the genre’s biggest hits yet, start there first, this post assumes you already have.

From here, one worth putting on your list is Clockwork Boys by T. Kingfisher (the pen name of Ursula Vernon), the first book in the Clocktaur War duology. It follows a paladin, an assassin, a forger, and a scholar sent to investigate a wave of mechanical soldiers threatening a neighbouring city, and it leans harder into dry humour and genuinely tense pacing than most steampunk fantasy manages. At around 230 pages, it’s a quick read rather than a doorstop, which makes it a good “test the waters beyond the bestsellers” pick if you’re not ready to commit to a full trilogy.

It’s worth being upfront about something here: not everything below is free. Clockwork Boys is a full commercial release, available to buy in print or ebook, so budget for it like you would any other novel. That distinction matters even more in the next category, because some of what’s recommended there is genuinely free to read from the first chapter, and some lives partly behind a Patreon paywall. I’ll flag which is which as I go, because “worth your time” and “worth your money” aren’t always the same question, and nobody wants to click into a story expecting a free read and hit a paywall three chapters in without warning.

If you’re building a reading list rather than picking one title, a decent rule of thumb: alternate a full commercial release (like Clockwork Boys) with a piece of ongoing web fiction. The pacing is different enough that it keeps things interesting, and it spreads your reading budget out instead of dropping it all in one place.

Worth pairing with it, or reading first if espionage-adjacent capers aren’t your thing: look for steampunk titles that lean into the “found technology” idea, stories where the mechanical elements are ancient and half-understood rather than a shiny Victorian invention someone just unveiled at a world’s fair. That flavour of steampunk (sometimes closer to “gaslamp fantasy” than strict steampunk) tends to get skipped on the standard bestseller lists entirely, because it doesn’t fit neatly into either the fantasy or the sci-fi shelf. It’s worth specifically searching for if the usual airship-and-goggles aesthetic has started to feel a little played out to you.

✍️ Web Fiction Worth Following

Serialized steampunk fiction is where a lot of the genre’s weirder, more interesting ideas end up first, before (or instead of) a traditional publishing deal. Royal Road is the biggest hub for this, and steampunk has a real, if smaller, home there alongside the platform’s dominant LitRPG crowd.

A few worth bookmarking: Tarnished: The Iron Frontier blends steampunk with a Wild West setting and an unapologetically rough-edged lead character, if you want your gears mixed with gunslingers. Red Dog Conspiracy plays the genre straight through a noir crime-family lens, and its author runs a Patreon for readers who want to support the project directly, worth knowing before you click through expecting everything to be free. Community threads also point to What Lies in the Foundry as a detective-flavoured steampunk pick worth checking out if investigative plots are more your speed than action.

What makes web fiction worth the extra effort of tracking an update schedule is how much room it gives authors to get weird. A traditionally published steampunk novel has to fit a marketing category. A Royal Road serial doesn’t, which is exactly how you end up with a steampunk noir crime saga or a steampunk western nobody would have greenlit as a debut novel from a major publisher. That’s the actual appeal here, not that it’s free (though that helps), but that it’s less filtered.

The trade-off is consistency. Serialized fiction updates on its own schedule and sometimes goes quiet for stretches while an author deals with life, a day job, or burnout. Treat these as ongoing follows rather than finished reads, and don’t be surprised if an update pace shifts over time. If you want a lower-commitment way in, read whatever’s currently posted, then decide if you’re in for the long haul before you get attached to a cliffhanger.

🎥 YouTube Channels Actually Worth Subscribing To

Most “steampunk YouTube” searches surface a wall of Halloween costume tutorials, useful if that’s what you need, but not what this section is about. These are channels covering the lifestyle and craft side, year-round rather than seasonally.

The Steampunk Explorer is the one worth starting with. It’s built around a video series called The World of Steampunk, structured like a proper newscast with recurring segments (The Steampunk Atelier for maker-focused content, A Steampunk Minute for quick hits), and it covers real people, places, and events in the steampunk community rather than just prop tutorials. If you’re the kind of person who wants to know what conventions and makers are actually doing right now, this is the closest thing to a dedicated steampunk news source on the platform.

Beyond that, worldbuilding-focused content is worth a specific mention for readers whose interest leans more toward the fiction and setting than the physical props. This corner of YouTube is smaller and more scattered than the cosplay side, so it’s less about one channel to subscribe to and more about searching “steampunk worldbuilding” directly and following whichever individual creators are actively posting when you look. That’s a less satisfying answer than a single channel recommendation, but it’s the honest one, and I’d rather tell you that than point you at a channel that’s gone quiet.

For the maker side specifically, if you want to see how the ideas in this post translate into an actual build, our own 3D printing steampunk props and decor walkthrough covers the process start to finish, which pairs well with whatever build-focused channels you end up following.

Music is the other underserved corner of steampunk YouTube worth a mention. There’s a small but genuine scene of musicians working in a steampunk or “clockwork cabaret” style, blending Victorian instrumentation with modern production, and it tends to surface more reliably through band-specific channels and live performance uploads than through a single curated playlist. If your interest in the aesthetic is more sonic than visual, that’s a corner worth exploring on your own terms rather than one this post can responsibly narrow down to a single recommendation without more digging than a hub post allows.

🎮 Games Worth Playing (And One Worth Watching For)

The established classics are established for good reason: BioShock Infinite and Dishonored both wear steampunk-adjacent industrial aesthetics well, even though neither markets itself as pure steampunk. Frostpunk takes the genre in a bleaker, more mechanical direction, city-building and survival management dressed in coal-smoke and iron, where every decision about heat and resources carries real weight.

On the horizon: Clockwork Revolution, from inXile Entertainment, is the one to watch. It’s a first-person RPG set in Avalon, a Victorian-inspired dystopian city, built around a mechanic where your choices literally rewrite the past and reshape the present you’re exploring. Worth flagging clearly since release info shifts fast in game development: as of the Xbox Games Showcase in June 2026, inXile confirmed the game for 2027 on Xbox Series X|S and PC (including Game Pass), not 2026 as earlier speculation suggested. No specific release month has been announced yet, so treat any more precise date you see elsewhere as unconfirmed until inXile says otherwise.

Worth noting for anyone building a wishlist rather than a “play this weekend” list: the genre has enough momentum right now that new steampunk-adjacent titles keep surfacing across different formats, tactical RPGs, extraction shooters, even the occasional fighting game borrowing the aesthetic. If you like checking in on what’s coming rather than just what’s out, it’s worth a periodic search rather than a one-time list, since this is one of the faster-moving sections of this post.

If you are a fan of strategy or simulation styles of game, you can also check out my general weekly news post on another of my blogs, Chill Place Gaming, where you can get ideas on the newest releases, including steampunk themed ones!

🧭 Start Here, Based On What You’re Actually Into

If you’re not sure where to dive in first, it usually comes down to which part of steampunk pulled you in to begin with.

• Leaning story? Start with the web fiction section above, Royal Road costs nothing but time, and it’s the lowest-commitment way to figure out which flavour of steampunk (western, noir, straight adventure) actually holds your attention.
• Leaning craft? Skip ahead to getting started with steampunk making, which walks through tools, materials, and first projects in more depth than this post has room for.
• Leaning aesthetic? Building a steampunk wardrobe as a plus-size woman is the better next stop, it’s about developing a look, not just buying one.

None of these are mutually exclusive. Most people who stick with this hobby end up dabbling in all three eventually, a stray Royal Road binge leads to wanting the aesthetic, which leads to wanting to build something yourself. Consider this post the map, not the whole trip. More specific picks in each category, including the deeper YouTube and games dives this post only had room to sketch out, are coming in future instalments of this hub.