Biggest influence: my mother.
I tend to think that immortal souls, invisible sky daddies, and Santa Claus all belong in the same basket. The disposition of that basket is left as an exercise for the reader.
All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.
Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.
We are, after all, homo economicus.
The late 90s were crazy science-fictional if you were inside the superheated steam bubble of the dot-com 1.0 industry.