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Has Stephen King written anything that either is or approaches the steampunk genre? Same question goes for diesel-punk and cyberpunk genres. I tried looking for something along those lines but didn't come across anything that stuck out.

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    The Dark Tower series has many parts that seem steampunk or dieselpunk. Blaine the Mono comes to mind.
    – Marvel Boy
    Commented Aug 14, 2019 at 12:59

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No, Stephen King writes (or so far has written).

  • Straight horror, mostly set in "Small Town America".

  • Post apocalyptic horror.

  • Weird cowboy horror.

When he wanders off his well trodden "Small Town America" track he goes to other "Earths" in other dimensions, any computers or machinery encountered there are "artifacts" left by some Precursor rather than steam, diesel or cyber punk.

I can recall nothing that has the flavor of a any "x-punk" genre, or even indirectly references one.

by way of credentials: I have read (at least once) pretty much everything King wrote up to and including "Cell"

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Beachworld was included in the collection Skeleton Crew. It is fairly straight science fiction. However the fact that the space ships are somewhat worn down, cyber augmentation is a thing, and the characters involved are freelancers, means it has a good case to be considered cyberpunk.

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    Hmm. Reading the Wikipedia summary it strikes me that while there may be augmentation, none of the sensibility of the story is cyberpunk.
    – DavidW
    Commented Aug 14, 2019 at 21:06
  • @DavidW Defining cyberpunk is always hard. :) The background is pretty corporate and dystopian though. The horror element is very much King, of course.
    – Graham
    Commented Aug 14, 2019 at 21:24
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With the caveat that I have not read all of Stephen King's extensive oeuvre, I did a quick scan of it, searching for titles I had not read, and I believe the answer is no. While Stephen King has written science fiction, none of it would fall under what I would consider "cyberpunk", "dieselpunk", or "steampunk".

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  • I haven't read The Running Man, or The Lawnmower Man but I would class the films based on those works as cyberpunk. I don't know how far from the source material either of them strays.
    – Jon B
    Commented Aug 14, 2019 at 12:02
  • Those movies - The Running Man & The Lawnmower Man - borrowed very little from the story other than the title. The Lawn Mower Man movie contains a scene where there is "an attack by lawnmower", other than that the movie and it's source couldn't be more different.
    – Binary Worrier
    Commented Aug 14, 2019 at 12:29
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    Agreed. I did consider those two, and discounted them for that reason.
    – FuzzyBoots
    Commented Aug 14, 2019 at 12:38
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    Similarly, "The Jaunt" is an explicitly sci-fi story, but lacks the dystopian future, chrome, cyberware, etc that's endemic to "cyberpunk".
    – FuzzyBoots
    Commented Aug 14, 2019 at 13:17
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    @FuzzyBoots The Running Man and The Long Walk (both originally published as "Richard Bachman" and collected in The Bachman Books) are very clearly set in dystopian futures, so are strong in the "punk" element. What they're missing though is the "cyber" part, where technological changes cause changes to the rules of the future society. It's why you can see cyberpunk-like themes in Brave New World but not 1984, for example. Which is a long way of saying "I agree". :)
    – Graham
    Commented Aug 15, 2019 at 12:02

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