Silkpunk is a speculative fiction genre coined by the author Ken Liu to describe a blend of science fiction and fantasy that draws its technological imagination from classical East Asian antiquity and Pacific seafaring cultures rather than from the Victorian industrial machinery of steampunk. In place of steampunk's brass and steam, silkpunk technology is built from a vocabulary of organic materials historically significant to East Asia and the Pacific, among them bamboo, paper, silk, coconut, feathers and coral, reflecting what commentators have described as an approach that is engineering and language together rather than steampunk translated into a different setting. Ken Liu's own Dandelion Dynasty series, beginning in 2015 and drawing on Chinese history, is the genre's founding work, and Neon Yang's Tensorate novellas, beginning in 2017, are among its other notable contributions.
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