Is Steampunk a bad book genre ?

I have a niece who was heavily into the whole Steampunk scene for awhile......

so I bought her a book, which was a  collection of Steampunk short stories, and I must admit, I read the book myself, and enjoyed the stories quite a bit. 

Not *my* usual personal thing,  but I would gladly buy another.  The stories were excellent for what they were. 

and yes, the lengths   just about right. 

I don't know if an entire novel would be as interesting........but the genre is no doubt  quite right for short stories. 

I would have to buy and read an entire novel's worth, to see how well it holds up. 

In fact, next time I am in the book store.......I will gladly buy one and try it out. 

It's pretty limited. I've read a few, the authors all seem to want to keep putting in the whole list of 'steampunk' items. The engineer who can fix anything and has leather clothing, dirt on his face, boots, and special cog equipment. Fighters with telescoping guns. Airships that are dirigibles. Etc. etc. etc.

It gets very boring. It's like they have to go down the checklist so as to not miss adding anything that's 'required'.

Steampunk isn't my style, but I know lots of people whose taste I admire and respect who DO enjoy it, and even write it themselves.

There is no such thing as a 'bad book genre'. I mean, think about it. There are only bad WRITERS.

There is no such thing as a bad genre. There are well-written books and poorly-written books. If you write a good steampunk novel, you have written a good book. If you write a crappy steampunk novel..... you see where I'm going with this. And in my own opinion as a reader, steampunk IS a pretty cool genre.

i don't know if it's bad or not, but i never really got into it

the only thing i ever read from it was "the difference engine." i read about half of that and lost interest, and that's supposed to be one of the books that started the whole genre