Steam punk has been around for a while, it is an established sub-genre of science fiction. Think of steam-powered mechanical computers based on Babbage's Difference Engine. Even Hollywood has dabbled here, think of the film Wild, Wild West. The genre relies on the original Steam Punkers, Jules Verne and H G Wells.

I have an interest in a similar concept: alternative technology. No, not alternative science based on "undiscovered" laws like magic or psychic powers, but on technology that evolved in different directions from ours. It would be unreasonable, for example, to think that technically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations have, or even once had in their primitive past, a technology similar to ours. We always think of ET with space ships, radio telescopes, ray guns, fusion power, computers, etc.

But how would technology evolve on an ocean world from highly intelligent tool-wielding marine creatures. Would they have fire, electricity, smelted metals? They might have access to materials, processes, and bodily senses we can't even conceive of. What kind of astronomy, hence physics, could a species inhabiting a fog-shrouded world develop?

It's easy to say that they would not get anywhere with those handicaps, but could they make up for it in other ways, ways, we can't even think of? We have only one example, we may be pretty provincial. We may be like an isolated tribe with only knowledge of its own language, finding other tongues than their own completely outside their experience.

Even on our own world, could Western science have come up with the compass, gunpowder, the number zero, algebra, the boomerang? (Yeah, we know how they work, but could we have developed one from scratch the way the aboriginal Australians did?) Even the neolithic cultures of the Pacific basin could build sailing craft that were faster, and could sail closer to windward, than 18th century Europeans and Chinese.

I wonder how much science we never even though of, and I wonder if alien technology and science, even of a level comparable to ours, would make any sense to us. Where would we be if we had come from a planet where we never discovered glass, for microscopes, telescopes, and test tubes?