Daughter of the Deep is heavily influenced by retrofuturism, which is a literary and artistic movement that focuses on past (retro) depictions of the future. While science fiction is a genre that explores imagined futures, retrofuturism is the incorporation of old ideas about what the future might involve and building on them from a contemporary point of view. The most common subgenre of retrofuturism is steampunk, as in the 2001 Disney animated movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire. In the film, the protagonist travels on an advanced, steam-powered submarine that is closer to what people in 1914 imagined for the future than it is to present-day advanced submarine technology. This technology is similar in concept to the “alt-tech” in Daughter of the Deep. Riordan’s alt-tech owes a literary debt to the futuristic vision of Jules Verne, who lived during the time of 19th-century steam-powered technology.

The Nautilus, a submarine that appears first in Verne’s novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and later in The Mysterious Island, is not steam-powered; it is propelled by electricity, which is generated from sea salt and coal. However, the depiction of the Nautilus in the famous 1954 Disney film adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which is a prototypical steampunk film, shows an aesthetic heavily influenced by Victorian technology.