I think the first steampunk book I read was "The Difference Engine" by the pioneers of cyberpunk, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.
I read quite a bit of the "punk" sub-genres of scifi- cyberpunk, steampunk, biopunk, dieselpunk.
For the uninitiated, to give a simplified description of the genres... Cyberpunk: high tech, low life. Steampunk: Future meets past. Biopunk: Bio instead of tech. Dieselpunk: Retro-futurism.
Iran is at the stage in development where things like science and engineering will rapidly advance, but the arts and culture will lag behind. Every state which has advanced to a certain point has experienced a similar phenomenon.
The US had it easy in going through that stage in the 1870s-1880s, to be rapidly advancing in the modern world must be a perspective-jarring experience.
Hopefully, Iran will avoid the (so far) inevitable end to this process--rampant jingoism and ill-conceived war leading to ruin.
It's not about acting like a zombie cyborg ninja assassin, but about blending in to the crowd so they can't find you. By "one of them", I kind of meant "the background". But I had a few too many shots in me to properly express myself.
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