Camera Obscura by Lavie Tidhar (Angry Robot Books). Art by David Frankland.
Should fiction be used to address social and political issues? Is a powerful message more important than a good story, or vice versa? Is it even possible to tell a story that is not informed by some kind of ideological bent or bias? And how do you balance the need for accuracy and specific detail with having fun in your fiction? These are some of the questions being grappled with in different ways by the next generation of Steampunk storytellers, and in this chapter, they share a few of their answers and ideas. (For more writing advice from a fantastical and science-fictional point of view, we recommend Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction.)
Some storytellers turn to novels, others to short stories, some to plays—even bringing their narratives to the silver screen. And today, Steampunk storytellers are also exploring cutting-edge visual and interactive media like graphic novels or role-playing games. Regardless of the medium, the Steampunk storyteller’s tradition is a long one; as documented in our prior volume, The Steampunk Bible, Steampunk began, first and foremost, with stories.
Some trace Steampunk’s roots all the way back to the literature of the late nineteenth century: the novels of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and boys’ adventure novels or “Edisonades.” Others point to the 1980s novels of James Blaylock, K. W. Jeter, and Tim Powers, or William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine. Either way, it was through the power of narrative that these retro-futuristic worlds first came to life, eventually giving rise to a creative and aesthetic movement spanning art, architecture, music, fashion, and dramatic performance.
This wasn’t just escapist literature, even from the start—Michael Moor-cock’s The Warlord of the Air is a searing indictment of imperialism. As author Lavie Tidhar says, “I think Steampunk first emerged out of two things: the fun and the attraction of classic Victorian literature, from Sherlock Holmes to Jules Verne on the one hand, and from an awareness of just how horrible the Victorian era actually was. It’s no surprise that the original Steampunks like Jeter found their inspiration in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, which documented the appalling conditions in the capital.”
It is true, however, that not until recent years did Steampunk fiction become not just more commercial, but also, at times, more complex and diverse, with plenty of interesting cross-pollinations between genres. Today’s Steampunk storytellers are spinning tales influenced by the fashion of cutting-edge cosplayers, the machines of makers like Jake von Slatt, and creating worlds set to the soundtrack of Victorian-influenced songsters. Some of it might be escapist, but some of it is transformational.
Thus the subgenre came full circle, picking up lots of nuance and complexity along the way. This might make Steampunk sometimes seem a little bit meta in its references. Yet, at its heart, Steampunk is also very old-fashioned in its approach to storytelling. In this aspect, although it may feel nothing like the heroic fantasy it has begun to supplant, it is actually very similar.
As author Tobias Buckell explains, “[Someone once] pointed out that, to writers (and their readers) in the early 1900s, farmland and preindustrial landscapes felt like the domain of a simpler, more understandable time. And that, to writers of the early 2000s, the early Industrial Age feels like the domain of a simpler, more understandable time as we hit an age of accelerating change. Steam and clockwork seem more understandable. It’s a sort of technological Overton Window, if you want to be a bit precocious about it. So, to that extent, Steampunk is of a lineage of the same activity that spun out Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, et al. Fantasy, in many ways, is the use of the symbols and mythology of a previous age, reinterpreted for modern writers to examine the world around them (Tolkien to process World War One, for example). So much of genre work is just a mirror used to examine what already exists.”
Brazilian writer Jacques Barcia also draws the connection to Tolkien, saying, “Just like ‘medieval fantasy’ has a huge number of fans—and I’m thinking about medieval fairs, Crusades reenactors and, yeah, Tolkien fans—Steampunks seem to be interested in that dreamland, that play, that game in which they’re part of a world that looked so cool back in the day.”
Writer and performer Anna Chen praises Steampunk for its imaginative potential, but from a different perspective. “Being half Chinese and half English, I straddle two major cultures,” she says. “Steampunk has enabled me to grasp my history in a profound way while opening up all sorts of subversive possibilities. It gives shape to a lot of amorphous ideas I’d had over the years, about identity, imperialism, politics, race, philosophy . . . but with such a sense of adventure and excitement. It’s like threading pearls.”
On the technology side, Lev Rosen, author of the well-received debut All Men of Genius, believes that Steampunk allows us to work out our own anxieties, using the lens of the past. “I think we’re at a point in history where technology is advancing at crazy speeds. We’re being flung into the future really quickly, and that’s intimidating, because we don’t know what’s coming. Every new piece of tech that comes out, from the Hadron Collider that people thought was going to cause a black hole to Google Glass, which people fear will be constantly taping and uploading every moment of life, brings these murmurs of anxiety. But if you take that tech and you put it in a fantastical, mad-science past . . . it becomes a way to interact with the ideas of advancing technology without being afraid of them. And I think that with us moving forward so quickly, a lot of people want to hold on to the past, too—there’s a fear we could lose the past altogether, that e-books will somehow cause all paper books in the world to burst into flame. Steampunk lets us hold on to that past while still moving forward.”
Whether you find that good or bad, it provides a clear example of how flexible Steampunk can be: utopian or dystopian, contained within the same scenario depending on context and point of view. This is the main reason Steampunk has vitality: It creates the argument for the progressive and the repressive within the same book, sometimes the same scenes. By bringing forward not just the positive idea of technological progress but all of the costs and terrible aspects that have their origins in the Industrial Revolution, it invites discussion and argument.
To others, like fiction writer, poet, and book reviewer Amal El-Mohtar, there’s an essential issue that may be getting lost in the fascination with the “bling” of Steampunk.
“I submit,” she wrote in a Tor.com post later reprinted in the anthology Steampunk Revolution, edited by Ann VanderMeer, “that the insistence on Victoriana in Steampunk is akin to insisting on castles and European dragons in fantasy; limiting, and rather missing the point. It confuses cause and consequence, because it is fantasy that shapes the dragon, not the dragon that shapes the fantasy. I want the cogs and copper to be acknowledged as products, not producers, of Steampunk, and to unpack all the possibilities within it.”
What else would she like to see? “I want to see Ibn Battuta offered passage across the Red Sea in a solar-powered flying machine of fourteenth-century invention, and for that to be called Steampunk. . . . I want to see Steampunk where the Occident is figured as the mysterious, slightly primitive space of plot-ridden possibility. I want Steampunk divorced from the necessity of steam.”
As you’ll see, Steampunk is opening up to a wealth of new influences—it is, in fact, evolving into something that might be only half-recognizable to Verne or Wells, a fact they themselves might applaud.
What makes a Steampunk storyteller? Not surprisingly, the wordsmiths we spoke to pointed to the literary works that influenced them most, listing dozens of books they had read as young adults and developing writers; these aesthetic stimuli proved a potent creative brew, inspiring some of our favorite stories in recent years.
“My favorite thing to read has always been nonfiction about history and other cultures,” says Jaclyn Dolamore, author of Magic Under Glass. “Basically, what people are doing and have done, everywhere, any time. Of course, I also loved fiction, and the things you love when you’re a kid imprint you forever. I have always loved the simple yet effective language and identifiable characters in children’s literature like the Little House books, Betsy-Tacy, and L. M. Montgomery.”
Diana Pho, founder of the popular Steampunk blog Beyond Victoriana, also points to her teenage reading habits. “My obsession with nineteenth-century literature started in high school with my passion for Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, and my love for sci-fi has gone on much longer than that (I remember my first chapter books being the illustrated versions of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth).” For Pho, Steampunk “is best expressed through writing and through performance,” so the act of storytelling extends to the stage. Through her steamsona, she can explore her interests in history and culture, with a generous dose of imaginative play: “fantastical props, costume, and acting over-the-top.”
Jedediah Berry is the author of The Manual of Detection, a retro-futurist fantasy that draws heavily on the aesthetic of 1920s noir. Berry’s influences range from retro to contemporary. “The book was published around the same time as Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch and China Miéville’s The City and the City, both of which also play with the tropes of hard-boiled crime fiction,” Berry comments. “Miéville suggested to me that we push for the term ‘noird’ (‘noir’ plus ‘weird’), which I quite like, because it gets at many of my influences. They ranged, for that book, from classic hard-boiled writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett to authors of stranger stuff: Franz Kafka, Mervyn Peake, Angela Carter, and others.”
“I’m an influence sponge,” says Jacques Barcia. “I’m interested in a wide number of topics, and I’m really passionate about many of them: martial arts, the punk subculture, extreme metal, extreme left-wing politics, art, body modification. Poetry. Role-playing games. Everything and everyone is an influence, really. Dalí, Picasso, and Banksy. Anonymous, Jello Biafra, and Henry Rollins. Napalm Death, Nasum, and taiko. Bash and Paulo Leminski. Cory Doctorow and Subcomandante Marcos.”
John Picacio’s original cover art for The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana by Jess Nevins (MonkeyBrain, 2005). This work inspired the fanciful Encyclopedia Victoriana entries written as original pieces by Nevins for this volume, located between chapters and stunningly illustrated by John Coulthart.
Speculative fiction writer Nisi Shawl also spoke to us about her inspirations for her current novel-in-progress, Everfair, a Steampunk story set in the Belgian Congo. The novel is the result of influences ranging from the literary to the historical. “I’d been fantasizing for years about writing a novel featuring characters based on a certain group of historical personages: E. Nesbit, Colette, J. M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells. I read about them, noticed certain correspondences in their lives and ways they might fit together.”
Steampunk seemed like a natural fit for these interests, but Shawl found herself ambivalent about the genre. “I adored Victorian literature, I had this thing for heavy equipment—but it was the colonialist, imperialist subtext that repulsed me.” Then a nonfiction book set in the time period—King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild—gave her the spark of inspiration that brought it all together. “That was the moment when the novel’s inspirational ideas formed their proper constellation and I knew how I’d do what needed to be done.”
Maurice Broaddus, who gave the anthology Steamfunk its name, also came to Steampunk through the lens of critique, with his desire to interrogate flawed assumptions leading to an intriguing and original work.
“I didn’t know a lot about Steampunk in the beginning,” he says. “I knew enough to make this joke on Twitter: ‘I’m going to write a Steampunk story with all black characters and call it “Pimp My Airship.’” It was after several editors wrote me to send it to them that I seriously explored the genre. I picked up Extraordinary Engines and the first of the VanderMeers’ Steampunk anthologies. The stories were excellent, but something about them left me overall dissatisfied. It’s like I was purposely excluded from a party. There was nothing culturally where I could see myself. Nothing. In fact, it almost seemed like a genre that purposely set out to not have to deal with, to put it delicately, any of the legacies of the society it harkens back to. And I said to myself, ‘I can’t do this,’ because I could not see any ‘me’ in this universe. So I put on some James Brown, X Clan, and Public Enemy and began writing. It began as parody, but in a lot of ways, it was more protest.”
For some, too, Steampunk fiction is simply a convenient shorthand for a creative vision they’ve been developing for some time, not to mention a much welcome community for those whose diverse and unusual interests had pushed them a bit off the beaten path.
Suna Dasi, the founder of Steampunk India, tells us, “I am one of those people who, after a lifetime passion for all things Victorian; a lifetime love of the macabre; of alternative ways of living and thinking outside the box, not to mention a taste for vintage sci-fi, were searching for community. Well, we all suddenly looked up to find the world had conveniently lumped the whole shebang into one genre that encompassed all of the above!”
One thing did trouble Dasi, however: the lack of complex, interesting Indian characters in Steampunk, particularly Indian women. Eventually, the issue became too pressing for her to ignore. She asked herself, “If it matters that much to me, why not have a crack at it myself? I wanted to create a world where the issues I’m addressing, if I am able, are not the main issue, but part of the tapestry. That took a while, and much research into Victorian India, Indian folklore, Indian heroes from history, Indian female warriors, and so on.”
Dasi’s own background demonstrates that the impulse to tell these stories is personal; her heritage has exerted an “enormous and vital influence” on her desire to write Steampunk specifically. “My ancestors left India around 1860, on a British East India ship from Madras, bound for the Caribbean as indentured workers—little more than slaves. My grandfather was born on a coconut plantation in Saint Vincent and raised Hindu. He was eventually released from his born status and married a native girl from Aruba in the Dutch Caribbean. My mother left for the Netherlands, where I was born and raised. Indian, Dutch, and English maritime history, women’s history, and the Industrial Revolution have always held a particular sway over my imagination, and Steampunk provides me with the most elegantly fitting mold for writing that unifies all of them.”
French author Arthur Morgan was also drawn to Steampunk for its weird amalgam of history and fantasy—and truth that is sometimes stranger than fiction. “What fascinates me with the Victorian era, and definitely got me into Steampunk, is the strange mix of industrial positivism, science, technology and fables, superstition, the supernatural. I love the rationalization of nonrational disciplines like spiritism and ether. So I came to Steampunk through literature—Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—and through comic books. . . . My favorite characteristic is the meta-reference of Steampunk literature. It mixes historical and literary references, which makes it intellectually mind-blowing.”
Morgan’s colleague Étienne Barillier echoes Dasi’s take: “Steampunk was around long before K. W. Jeter coined its name,” he says. “Most people who actually love Steampunk loved it before they even discovered the name. . . . I’ve never met a French person my age who doesn’t remember watching Wild Wild West as a kid. You know H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, even if you never read their books. You know them because they belong to your culture, the very same culture Steampunk is building itself upon. Explaining Steampunk to your grandma is easy!”
Because Steampunk is a broad church, it tends to cannibalize works that aren’t necessarily Steampunk. For example, China Miéville doesn’t think of his Bas-Lag novels (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, Iron Council) as Steampunk, and yet a certain level of technology on display in those books means that some readers do use that label to describe Miéville’s work.
Paolo Bacigalupi, author of the best-selling The Windup Girl, describes a similar experience. The Windup Girl had been out for a while when reviewers began describing it as Steampunk. “Honestly, I was perfectly happy to have it adopted, because if someone sees something they like in one of my books, then I’m happy they’re happy,” he says. “But I never thought of it as Steampunk when I was writing it.
“In my mind, Steampunk feels nostalgic. It’s a looking back to a history that’s cooler and more intricate and fetishized than our own true past. Fundamentally, it seems to me to be an exploration of fantastical histories that never were, but would have been wild and wonderful if they just could have been. So while The Windup Girl has dirigibles and intricate muscle-powered engines, at its root, it’s explicitly not about an alternate past. It is intended as an extrapolation into the future, and as a prod for readers to consider our present moment. It’s very specifically about now, and where we’re headed from here. My sense is that this isn’t Steampunk’s prime directive.”
It’s clear that Steampunk has the ability to address big, complex issues. Has it realized that potential yet? It might have started to.
As author Richard E. Preston notes, “Steampunk’s pretty, and that always has appeal. But Steampunk is also laden with vast potential to explore the modern world, and people are beginning to recognize its power as allegory. The Victorian/Edwardian era (Steampunk embraces this period, and also roughly extends back into the late eighteenth century and forward to the end of the Great War) was a time of immense progress, darkness, and contradiction. Most of its conflicts are still with us today: man versus machine, economic progress/empire versus exploitation/colonialism, industrialization versus nature, hedonism versus sexual repression, sexism versus female suffrage and equality, Darwinism versus creationism, utopianism versus disillusionment, and on and on. A writer can really tackle our modern life through Steampunk, and I think readers will continue to respond to that. . . . The great Steampunk novel has yet to be written.”
Illustration by John Coulthart for insert in Snakes and Ladders (2001), a recorded performance by Alan Moore.
Steering Clear of Clichés and Pursuing the New
For Steampunk storytellers, steering clear of clichés is less about the visual aesthetic of goggles and gears—though that does play a role—and more about the kinds of stories being told. The characters we encounter, the adventures they experience, the environments they inhabit, and the conflicts they endure. Like Suna Dasi, who set out to tell the stories she wanted to hear, an aspiring Steampunk storyteller should dig beyond the surface and search for what’s original.
“I think typical prim and proper Victorian society has been done to death at this point,” comments Jaclyn Dolamore. “The Victorian era is probably my favorite historical period, I just want it out of the box a bit. I always like seeing more diversity of time periods and places.”
Airship pirates, another tried-and-true staple of the genre, may also have become overly cliché. “Airship. Pirates. Have. To. Go,” declares Diana Pho. “Mostly because they are a glorification of a criminal subculture without a thorough examination of what real pirate life was like, or how creative a speculative look at pirate life could be. And because most situations that involve airship pirates in fiction have become uninspired and predictable.”
But while some might feel that the swashbuckling stratospheric airship has sailed, others are still having plenty of fun with the concept, and finding new ways to repurpose the trope. As Richard E. Preston notes, “My Pneumatic Zeppelin series is written for a reader who has never experienced Steampunk before. I sort of grabbed the clichés—the zeppelin, the goggles, the Victorian clothing—and ran with them to tell the story of a crew of a ship at war. I picked Steampunk because I wanted to write a swashbuckling tale with strong female characters, some in positions of command. I also have zebra-striped aliens involved. Steampunk is fun. It has a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Henry Rider Haggard at its core.” Those strong female characters might just be the key, though—along with several other characters, including the airship’s captain, who are thoroughly kind and decent people. Steampunk without cynicism might be just as refreshing as finding different tropes through which to showcase it.
Lev Rosen calls out what he sees as another tired plot mechanism: overused Lovecraft lore. “There is one trend I’ve been noticing and having some trouble with of late—this tendency to throw Lovecraftian monsters in without any rhyme or reason. They come at the end of the book, usually, where it’s revealed that the evil scientists/cabal/whatever wasn’t just killing people to further his experiments/take over the world/whatever but also because he was opening a portal to a realm beyond ours where creatures beyond our imagination lurk. And then they come pouring out and start destroying stuff, and then the heroes stop them. I like a Lovecraftian terror as much as the next guy, but they always seem tacked on at the end—no hint of their existence before they appear—and then they always die so easily.”
Rosen also cites as clichés the Queen’s Secret Agent and the Detective and His Assistant (with a special tip of the hat to Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes). However—and this is a big however—what falls flat for one person may feel totally fresh to another, especially with the right twist. “In all fairness, though,” Rosen admits, “a lot of the stuff I used in All Men of Genius has gotten pretty stale by now, too; spunky girl scientists; evil, clawed robots; London-based—you see it a lot. I’d like to see more queerness in Steampunk, more people of color, more people who aren’t Christians or atheists (and who actually interact with their beliefs); more Steampunk that takes place in countries other than the U.S. and Britain.”
Tobias Buckell points to this desire as well, saying: “I’m trying to have a conversation with a larger world. But I’m also trying to write these books that I would have killed to have had when I was out there back in the beginning, reading and not finding people who were like me: living in a diverse world, or of a diverse background themselves.”
Jacques Barcia says, “I think this is changing now, but most Steampunk authors and fans seem to forget that, behind the wonders, exciting discoveries, and romanticism, the Victorian era was marked by imperialism, genocide, wars, and deforestation. It was high chimneys and black smoke. It was men, women, and children working eighteen-hour shifts, feeding the fires of ‘progress,’ digging in coal mines. But it was also a time of revolutions. The First International, the Paris Commune. The rise of feminism. Independence wars around the world. That’s what interests me in Steampunk. The wondrous life of the poor, the outsider, the colonized, in a world populated by clockwork automatons, Crowleyan magic, and social struggle. I think this is a cliché, but I’d love to see more punk in Steampunk.”
For imaginative authors such as Tobias Buckell, the story and the setting go hand in hand to give readers a taste of a much wider world. “I was trying to create a Steampunk adventure that explored some of those issues with helpings of action and adventure, while also hoping to bring a bit of complexity to it,” he says. “By using the Caribbean peoples, by exploring the issues of conquest and war, I was hoping to maybe chart a course for getting the best of both worlds. The aesthetic fun of Steampunk geared in with a diverse cast.”
Suna Dasi also plays with characters and setting, pursuing her original goal of creating stories where women could claim the spotlight as heroines, while not losing sight of the big picture: Steampunk should be fun. “I tend to put women in unusual settings or places and try to think through, in as much detail as possible, how these situations would pan out. . . . In the grand tradition of fiction and workshop tinkering, I am warping, bending, and altering things, but in my Steampunk India you will still find nasty British ruling classes and nasty patriarchal Indian mores alongside some morally liberated characters. However, the political correctness can kill creativity, so I’m careful in its use. I am not on a crusade to excuse, elevate, or exonerate either the British or the Indian nation for anything. That said, there is still plenty of room left for general sociopolitical observation, satire, and gender politics without becoming an apple-crate preacher. . . . There needs to be enjoyment in the process, and this can be achieved without losing either integrity or amusement. I need to have fun.”
Some, however, find the process of provocation and challenge to be the most interesting part of the work. Nisi Shawl is structuring her approach around asking questions, first and foremost. “I see mostly the same clichés in Steampunk as I do in other imaginative literatures: the unmarked state (white, cis, able-bodied, et cetera) is the same, and non-European cultures are a sort of spice to the stories rather than their essence. There is a Boys’ Own Adventure tone to the narratives I’ve read, which I find really problematic, even when they’re somewhat subverted by giving the narrative voice to a girl or a woman. . . . Mere gender switch-ups do not erase colonialist imperatives.” But, as Shawl says, “That weakness can also be a strength if the givens are questioned. Then the questions the author needs to ask are right there, right at hand.”
Lavie Tidhar points to addressing those issues up front: “What I enjoyed doing in the Bookman Histories—and it’s in the context that we have these aliens, essentially—is that a lot of the technology may appear to be impossible Victorian but can actually be described in terms of present-day science fiction. I liked that. That is, for the characters, the technology can only be described in nineteenth-century terms, but for the reader, we can sort of see how this is post-2000 SF dressed up. I also hope the books allowed me, in however light a way, to discuss issues of colonialism, and also, since this is a book of alternate history, to try and imagine how the nineteenth century could have been better—hence the limited European settlement in America, limited colonialism in Africa, more freedom for women, less obvious racism (and both the heroes of The Bookman and Camera Obscura are not white, without that necessarily defining them).”
Kraken vs. Airship: Battle Scene. Concept by Richard Ellis Preston, Jr. Art by Jeremy Zerfoss.
Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War by Richard Ellis Preston, Jr.
Dispatched on a rescue mission, the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s 200-foot launch, the Arabella, races into the skies over the snowbound mountains of Tehachapi. A bloodfreezer blizzard overtakes the Arabella and axe teams are immediately dispatched to the airship’s envelope to cut away accumulating ice. A monstrous alien Kraken appears from the maelstrom and latches onto the Arabella’s stern, trapping the axe team stationed there. With his crew members and airship being torn apart, Captain Romulus Buckle leads a desperate charge to hold the kraken off until reinforcements arrive.
1 Latching On (Kraken attaches to airship, stern ice team trapped)
2 Battle Begins (Buckle’s bow ice team engages, crewman Hudson killed, stern ice team rescued)
3 Advantage, Beastie (kraken forms tentacle wall, fighting retreat, Steinway killed)
4 Reinforcements (Sabrina arrives with musket team, ineffective musket volley, crewman Valentine wounded, grappling cannon fired)
5 A Sea of Tentacles {Grappling cannon mangled, Martin killed, Buckle grabbed and freed)
6 A Desperate Charge (Kraken drags Sabrina away, Buckle charges with pistol & axe)
7 Killing the Kraken (Buckle kills the beastie)
8 Last Rescue (Buckle chops Sabrina free of tentacle as Kraken corpse slides off stern)
For the artist/maker contingent of the Steampunk/retro-futurist community, DIY is totally natural; there is always work to be done with one’s hands. But what does the DIY ethic mean for a storyteller?
Traditionally with storytelling, we think of modes in fiction: novel, short story, memoir, or prose poem. When it comes to simply putting words on the page, DIY is not just a meaningful concept—it’s probably the only option. (Although perhaps its ethos still applies: Our storytellers are forging new worlds and alternative histories, refusing to be restricted to real-life events, even if it sometimes means reinventing the wheel.)
However, when we get into more complex, immersive modes of storytelling, DIY becomes a more applicable and relevant concept. And once again, Steampunkers, who in many cases are starting from scratch to tell the stories they are determined to bring to life, are not afraid to take matters into their own hands or approach creative challenges head-on.
“I consider myself a writer most of all,” remarks Suna Dasi, “but slowly and surely the making of things has crept upon me over the past two years. In order to create visual accompaniments to the stories, I have had to seriously think through plausible Steampunk costumes for native women, in settings that enhance their identity and function in a Steampunk Indian society. Sewing isn’t my forte, but altering, embellishing, and modifying are fast becoming a great source of joy. In our affiliated group, we have a main designer and seamstress and she is very gifted and innovative. We also have a mad female inventrix, and the smells, smoke, and grindings from her workshop are truly something!”
Jennifer and J. K. Potter’s shelf of knickknacks, published in the Lambshead Cabinet, repurposed as fiction.
Or consider interactive artist Elizabeth LaPensée, whose painstaking animation process speaks to the care and respect with which she handles the Native American stories that inform her short films and graphic art. “I created characters and landscapes using shells, beads, bone, leather, copper, birch, pinecones, modified and then animated moving assets pixel by pixel in the image-editing software Adobe Photoshop, which were then exported as individual screenshots and compiled using the film-editing software Final Cut Pro.”
Projects like LaPensée’s suggest a strong connection between art, making, and storytelling. Collaborations can also have the same effect: something made suggesting something told. For example, Jake von Slatt’s imaginary machines, created for the anthology The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, tell their own story of their creation, but also served as inspiration for writers Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders to create their own fictions about the machines.
“These were really an enjoyable project for me, and a bit of a departure,” von Slatt says. “There’s a certain freedom in building something purely for its aesthetics, something that does not have to work. Most of the projects I’d done to date were primarily engineering projects done with an artistic eye. These two ‘machines’ were some of the first one hundred percent art projects and released a part of my creative instinct that had previously been shackled by the need for something to work, and work reasonably well. I think they were so enjoyable to build because they were not Steampunk versions of a thing, as so much Steampunk art is. They were ostensibly artifacts, incompletely understood objects with vague pedigrees. They didn’t have to work but needed to look like they could.”
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (HarperCollins, 2006).
Objects as Narrative: Jake von Slatt’s Fake Machines
Von Slatt’s description of the parts that went into both pieces is a story unto itself.
What he calls the Chronoclasmic Inhibitor “was the more fantastical of the two pieces. The starting point was the bell jar, found at the swap shop at our town’s rubbish transfer station. . . . Once the ‘envelope’ for the piece was established, I collected a big box of likely parts from my ‘warehouse’ and sat down to see which fit together the best. The base is from a vintage table lamp, probably about circa 1940. . . . The marble plinth was from the base of another, more modern lamp. In fact, all of the brass parts in the midsection are lamp components.”
The two hard drive platters on top of the plinth are made of “aluminum with a thin platinum alloy coating and have a beautiful ‘dark mirror’ look. The central component of the piece is a cast-glass jewel from the local craft store. Crystals are iconic centerpieces, even in science fiction (‘Captain! The dilithium crystals canna take the strain!’). If you want to imbue something with mystical power, put a crystal at the center of it.”
The bits of true tech in the piece are even more interesting. “The clockwork at the bottom is from an electro-mechanical timer. . . . I found it about twenty years ago in a dumpster behind a company that specialized in making instruments for monitoring the environment as well as nuclear weapon tests! The brown-and-blue cloth-insulated wire is not as old as it looks, but is from a specialized application. It is one strand of wire from the inside of an elevator control cable. I found a ten-foot leftover length of the cable in the mud at a building site when I was about fifteen. This is the very last of it; marvelous stuff!
“Finally, the white cotton sheath that looks like shoelace is an actual vintage telephone insulation material. I got to talking to the technician that came out to my house to install my new fiber-optic Internet service; he was a career lineman. After showing him some of my projects, he said, ‘I have something for you,’ and he gave me a roll that must have a thousand feet of this stuff on it. The stuff was once used for insulating cable splices on telephone poles and underground vaults. The lineman would solder the two strands of wire in a cable that had a hundred-plus strands, and then slip a section of this ‘shoelace’ over the joint. The connection would be dipped in a pot of hot wax (that must have been fun to carry up the pole!) to seal it from the weather. The whole thing would then be wrapped in more cotton and saturated with wax before being sealed in a lead casing. The little bit of red you see at the top of the piece is where I dipped the lace in some hot wax to acknowledge that heritage.
“Meanwhile, the ‘Bassington brain’ came together from an odd selection of components, which included a military-spec photodiode that I believe was used in an instrument that measured runway visibility at airports in the sixties and seventies. The other bit of military-spec hardware in this piece is the silver hermetically sealed relay near the bottom of the jar. I almost didn’t include it because it was so beautifully made I wanted to put it in a piece of equipment that actually worked!
“The rest of the components all came from a vintage 1940s vacuum-tube tester. I found this tube tester in the trash when I was in grade school and it sat in my parents’ attic until they needed the storage a couple of years ago. It’s nearly identical to the one I used as a TV technician in my early career. It was beautifully constructed, certainly by hand, with many precision wire–wound resistors and high-quality condensers. It was a piece of test equipment and had to be accurate and stable. The most beautiful parts, I think, are the wiring harnesses, and these I extracted and resoldered to the components in the ‘brain’ with care to preserve their organic-sense, brainlike folds.”
All of these elements suggested a mechanical brain to von Slatt. “It seems natural that a component of this sort would come with a test fixture that would also serve as a tabletop base when it was being worked on by a technician. A vintage portable typewriter case fit the bill, and I adorned it with a few bits of vintage electronic test equipment and test equipment nameplates from the same era as the tube tester.”
Storytellers and fiction writers can certainly take inspiration from this process charted by von Slatt. If you look closely—and use your imagination—simple objects can contain entire secret lives, and obsolete technology can point to fascinating pieces of alternate history. With von Slatt’s artifacts as inspiration, Anders and Newitz created their own narratives:
Mooney & Finch Somnotrope by Charlie Jane Anders. These sleep simulators have become rare artifacts—even though they were mass-produced in the Mooney & Finch Sheffield facility, each one of them emerged as a unique object due to the pressures of the oneiric centrifuge. And they were only sold for three months, prior to the first reports of somnambulism addiction and peripatetic insomnia. The idea of experiencing four or five hours of sleep within a mere few minutes held almost unlimited allure for the world’s busiest captains of industry and harried matrons. But few were prepared for the intoxication of the Somnotrope’s soothing buzz, the sheer pleasure of watching its central piston raise and lower, gently at first and then with increasing vigor, until one’s mind flooded with dream fragments and the impression of having sailed to the nether kingdom and back, all in a few minutes. It only took a few unfortunate deaths for the whole line to be recalled.
Von Slatt Harmonization Device by Annalee Newitz: NAME system and method for cultural transmission scrambling. Patent application number: 15/603976. Assignee: Harmonization Incorporated. Summary of the invention: In the colonies, cultural information is passed from one entity to another using data storage devices accessed psionically via instructional facilities. It is the object of this device to locate, demodulate, and scramble cultural transmissions passing between hostile social formations. This novel device allows operators to inject false vernacular and traditions into cultural signals as they pass between entities. It can also hijack signals carrying historical intelligence by providing a stronger signal on the same frequency. Fig. 1 illustrates an ideal system, where the knobs on the lower right demodulate cultural transmissions, and the amplifier beneath the bell transmits a psionic signal that can reach any analog neurological entity within seven thousand kilometers.
On top of that, von Slatt has his own story for both objects: “The one with the red jewel is a Chronoclasmic Inhibitor and it effects the perception of the passing of time by the human brain—not time itself, mind you, but its perception. The other is a Bassington & Smith Electro-Mechanical Analog Brain, about as smart as a common house cat. It was built to manage the systems aboard an ocean liner and was salvaged from its wreckage. A rather predictable and foolish adventure, really. I mean, whose bright idea was it to put a cat in charge of a vessel that displaced thirty-two thousand tonnes?”
Sometimes, inspiration can be as simple as a strange object, a mysterious artifact, or an enigmatic image.
Mothership, original cover art by John Jennings for Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, edited by Bill Campbell and Edward Austin Hall (Rosarium Publishing, 2013). While not a Steampunk anthology per se, the book includes some retro-futurism and is well worth seeking out.
Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution, edited by Ann VanderMeer (Tachyon, 2012). Cover design by Elizabeth Story.
Steaming into a Victorian Future, edited by Julie Anne Taddeo and Cynthia J. Miller (Scarecrow Press, 2013). Cover design by Devin Watson.
Steampunk Collections
What you choose to say using Steampunk as your genre is an expression of your unique attributes as a writer—and many choose Steampunk because its popularity allows them to get their ideas across to a larger audience than they might otherwise reach. Steampunk anthologies in translation, such as the recent Plnou Parou by Czech editor Martin Šust, are bringing authors like Tobias Buckell, Jeffrey Ford, Jay Lake, and Carrie Vaughn to an enthusiastic readership abroad. In a sense, the bigger Steampunk has gotten commercially, the more it, ironically, allows cutting-edge ideas and philosophies to be expressed within that “broad church.” More and more, anthologies like Steampunk World (edited by Sarah Hans, and launched and funded via Kickstarter) and Steampunk Revolution (edited by Ann VanderMeer) are showcasing the next generation of Steampunk writers: not necessarily based in the United States or the UK.
The anthology Steamfunk is another showcase for different perspectives, and another example of the DIY impulse, if in a different direction. It began, according to coeditor Milton Davis, “as a discussion among writers about Steampunk. We were discussing how most Steampunk stories and images don’t incorporate the black experience during that time period. Since I’ve done a few anthologies and I’m a doer rather than a talker, I suggested we do an anthology of stories told from our perspective. When the question of a title came up, Maurice Broaddus, a talented writer who had published a Steampunk story titled ‘Pimp My Airship,’ said he called what he writes ‘Steamfunk.’ And there you have it.”
What is Steamfunk? “To me, [it] is the incorporation of African and African American culture into the Steampunk movement. It’s more than just wearing the Victorian costumes; it’s about expressing the situation and culture of people of African descent during the time period on which Steampunk is based. I think Steamfunk, at least as how we interpret it, has been the first to discuss the Victorian era from a black perspective. British Steampunk is notorious for totally ignoring the issues of other cultures during the time period. American Steampunk has been more inclusive, but most of the stories that have tackled the issue have been from a white writer’s perspective. With Steamfunk you get a no-holds-barred perspective, which in my opinion expands the vision tremendously.”
Coeditor Balogun Ojetade says, “Steamfunk is how I express Steampunk. I call myself—and others who express Steampunk through Steamfunk—a ‘Steamfunkateer.’ Steamfunk poses important questions about the nature and the future of science, society, and commerce, and issues of race, gender, and class. Most readers of Steamfunk stories will simply enjoy the courageous heroes and heroines, the bone-crushing battle scenes, and the wondrous airships, ether weapons, and mechanical monsters. Others, however, will consider the greatest virtue of Steamfunk to be its power as social commentary—which speaks, sometimes subtly and sometimes quite loudly, of the relation of technology to man, of what it means to be truly free, and the ways in which industrialization affects how we relate to one another.”
Davis and Ojetade have extended their collaboration further, funding and producing an indie feature-length film titled Rite of Passage, which expands on one of Davis’s stories in the original collection.
An image from Will Hindmarch’s Astonishing! An Original Role-playing Card Game, available to play as an exclusive original online add-on to this book. This kind of interactive storytelling is one way readers can curate their own stories and narratives. Art by Jeremy Zerfoss.
The Rise of Ransom City, Felix Gilman
Sometimes being simple is the way to stand out.
The Rise of Ransom City is written as an old-fashioned memoir tracing the life of an industrialist building a grand city with the help of a questionable source of light and electricity. I went to letterpress artist Ross MacDonald to create a cover reminiscent of an earlier era. Ross hand-set the title and author type from his collection of nearly 400 wood and metal fonts. He also created the logo/dingbat representing an idealized vision of the protagonist as an agent of science and industrialization. It’s fun to create an actual cover using physical objects, but ultimately, of course, the piece was photographed and digitized for our own mass production.
Since the Steampunk aesthetic can often be defined by its visual complexity and great attention to details, it’s easy to imagine Ransom City (and its predecessor, The Half-Made World) standing out on the shelves next to the usual array of full-color, highly rendered artwork on science fiction and fantasy covers, while harking back to the nineteenth century through the very process by which its cover was created. That’s the hope, anyway.
“Lightbringers and Rainmakers,” Felix Gilman
This was an interesting opportunity. “Lightbringers and Rainmakers” allowed us to dive more deeply into the visual world first explored in a set of novels. “Lightbringers” is a work of short fiction meant to act as background material, or introduction, to Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City. Where we opted for simple icons on the covers of those two novels, here we could zoom in and more fully render an impression of the world these stories inhabit. I asked artist Jon Foster to tackle this project for us since the figures he paints often embody a nineteenth-century sensibility.
As with Ransom City, we focused on the light-making apparatus. That, combined with the pose of the character on the right, suggests a kind of progress and technology marching forward—but on closer examination we get a hint of a more nefarious narrative. It would have been tough to get away with such a busy and subtle image on a book cover, but when dealing with a magazine illustration, we can often showcase artwork that rewards more time spent with it.
Jon Foster’s illustration for “Lightbringers and Rainmakers” by Felix Gilman (Tor.com, October 2010).
The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, edited by John Joseph Adams. Cover art by Ben Templesmith (Tor, 2013).
The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World
Domination, edited by John Joseph Adams The fun of anthologies is that you get to work with the overall theme of the book without being beholden to one particular story. Since there is horror and often a little bit of perverse humor characterizing these stories of mad scientists, I thought it was a great opportunity to work with well-known comic book artist Ben Templesmith. His work often focuses on horror, but his stylization and cartooning let his images remain palatable and even fun. It allowed us to use an image that might appear too horrific if it were played straight. That, plus a little bit of over-the-top humor in the copy, is a way to cue the reader that there may be horror here, but it’ll be a fun ride as well. Designer Peter Lutjen did the type layout, which, while fairly simple, does an excellent job of setting up hierarchies and presenting a lot of information in a way that draws the reader in and doesn’t crowd the art.
All Men of Genius is a Twelfth Night–esque tale about a young woman disguising herself as a man to enter a system that allows only males—in this case, a science academy. I’d wanted to work with scratch-board artist Scott McKowen for some time, ever since I first became aware of his work from a series of Broadway posters I saw on the streets of New York. The scratchboard technique is, of course, reminiscent of nineteenth-century engravings.
The trick here was getting the right balance between male and female. The typefaces were also chosen to mimic nineteenth-century newspaper or poster design. And, of course, the gears give the cover an unmistakable Steampunk quality. It is often said that we have about three seconds to stop a reader in their tracks and convince them to pick up a book. After that, the job of selling the book usually falls to the copy, maybe the quotes, or the few pages a potential reader might sample. With so little time to make a first impression, relying on instantly recognizable signifiers can mean the difference between the book being picked up or ignored.
“Zeppelin City,” Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick
“Zeppelin City” is a strange and action-packed adventure that takes place in a rich urban setting. I wanted something a little steampunk, a little noir, and a bit gritty to boot. An art director friend turned me on to the work of Benjamin Carré and he absolutely fit the bill. (So much of art direction comes down to good casting.) Carré was able to capture the feeling of a claustrophobic city with adventure happening between the cracks. The slight tilt in the composition gives the static elements of the architecture some life. The scale of the buildings and the zeppelins next to the figure in the gyrocopter signal to the reader that there is going to be a lot happening here, and it will be these individuals that’ll make the difference. . . .
“The Strange Case of Mr. Salad Monday,” G. D. Falksen
“The Strange Case of Mr. Salad Monday” is a playful story that imagines our current conversations and evolution of language, through social media and texting, in a nineteenth-century world. David Malki, perhaps best known for his web comic Wondermark, was the perfect artist for this story. His pen-and-ink drawings intentionally mimic newspaper illustrations of the time. The illustration, showing a massive printing press as well as the paper itself, is all about the dissemination of information, now and in the past—and we also get to see gears in action!
Benjamin Carré’s illustration for “Zeppelin City” by Eileen Gunn and Michael Swanwick (Tor.com, October 2009).
David Malki’s illustration for “The Strange Case of Mr. Salad Monday” by G. D. Falksen (Tor.com, October 2009).
The Working Process
For a storyteller, the working process can be circuitous and convoluted. Sometimes, working doesn’t look like working. . . . It can involve reading, scribbling, and lots and lots of daydreaming.
But in terms of elements specifically important to Steampunk storytellers, research ranks right up there. While a vivid imagination and dazzling flights of fantasy are definitely beneficial, solid scientific details and true-to-life historical facts can help ground the story in reality. And grounding the story in reality will make it a lot more engaging and interesting to read.
Lawrence Kasdan, the American producer and screenwriter who contributed to illustrious projects such as The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, once commented, “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.” Our Steampunk storytellers are no exception. Here’s how a few of them approach the “homework” that informs their creative work.
“With the novel,” says Anna Chen, “I’m having to make myself an expert in a wide range of subjects: history, botany, geology, geography, physics, aerodynamics, gender politics . . . but I like the challenge and quite enjoy the idea of being some sort of Renaissance woman if I work hard enough.” Overall, Steampunkers tend to be a pretty literate bunch . . . indeed harking back to the days when Renaissance men and women were celebrated in drawing rooms across the continent . . . and Chen’s wide-ranging curiosity and lengthy reading list is not an exception, more the norm.
Author Kit Cox comments, “I do a lot of research of historical facts and try and weave as many in around the plot. I like the fact that a lot of history is stranger than any fiction I could write.”
Diana Pho agrees. “I would go to the library and spend whole days not writing, but reading sources and jotting notes about where certain things would be useful. I personally love the research part as much as I do the writing!”
For some, the research can begin months or years before they start writing—it can take that long for inspiration and atmosphere to percolate into concrete ideas. “Summer of 2009, I was in New York City hunting down books on Weimar Berlin at the Strand, and I started writing my Weimar Berlin–inspired novel in the beginning of 2011,” says Jaclyn Dolamore. “So I plan ahead. It’s pretty normal for me to have read ten good research books dealing with a time, place, or scenario before I even start.”
Jedediah Berry is also a dedicated planner. “I make charts,” he tells us. “Or I write things on index cards and shuffle them. Or I outline obsessively, knowing that I’ll probably abandon the outline, but trusting that some bright, tiny thing will merge from the mess. Then I write my way toward it.” Berry offers us another example of the way that the storyteller’s work doesn’t always feel productive, even when it is. Cutting four-fifths of an outline doesn’t feel like an efficient way to work, but sometimes it produces the best final results.
Richard E. Preston explains that, because his background is in screen-writing, he is “partial to scribbling all of my scenes and character beats down on index cards and tacking them up on big bulletin boards. I build this mosaic of cards early on in the process. I like to be able to see the outline of my story, and these cards represent the skeletal structure, which I flesh out as I proceed. This is not a limiting or static process by any means—I rarely write linearly and spend a lot of time adding, removing, and rearranging the cards as the story develops.”
Suna Dasi, whose work focuses on placing her characters into a specific cultural context, outlines some of the considerations she keeps in mind as she develops an interesting, well-rounded, and realistic world. “I start by thinking of the things I would like to see, and this can be inspired by any kind of thought. What would a Steampunk temple dancer’s day be like? From there I will flesh out the actual story. I will do research and make notes regarding the overarching subject. . . . Very often I will walk into historical aspects that are challenging, and then I have to think about either incorporating them and giving them my own slant or commentary through the story or make a decision to ignore it. For characters that appear in a photo gallery, I choose again what I would like to see, then work out a minor backstory if they appear independent from the narrative. After that, the fun starts: What are they wearing? Do they use weaponry, laboratory equipment? Is their jewelry indicative of their trade or identity?”
Many storytellers find that once the characters come to life, the rest is easy (well, relatively easy). These imaginary people often begin walking, talking, and acting of their own accord, creating the tensions and conflicts that fuel a good story. Of course, once those walking, talking characters get into a few scrapes, the storyteller may find they’ve plotted themselves into a corner . . . just one of many setbacks that can derail a narrative project before it begins. How does the intrepid storyteller confront such challenges? Read on.
Even for a very successful creative person, roadblocks can unfortunately come in a lot of forms. Some of them have to do with the nitty-gritty of the creative process itself and others have to do with the inevitable setbacks and frustrations that come with any career—conquering fear of failure and bouncing back from rejection.
“When I was younger, it was very hard to follow through with a whole novel,” says Jaclyn Dolamore. “Nowadays, I know that if I’m stuck it’s probably because I took a wrong turn somewhere or that a particular scene is just boring and should probably go, but back then if I got stuck I’d be paralyzed and usually drop the whole thing. I didn’t know how to rework a story.”
Through years of practice, Dolamore has honed her craft and gained confidence; now she knows how to work through those narrative roadblocks and creative cul-de-sacs. However, she admits that sometimes the self-doubt remains. “Those are the days when you start comparing yourself to other writers, or think of the worst reviews you’ve ever received. That mood can hit me out of nowhere, and hit hard, so one day everything is going beautifully and the next day I’m in the depths of despair. What gets me past it now is experience. I’ve gone through so many different ups and downs so many times that I can usually talk myself out of them just by reminding myself of a previous time I felt the same.”
Though Maurice Broaddus is an experienced writer, he is no stranger to plot problems either, nor to the process of taking a story apart to put it back together again. His Steamfunk short story “Pimp My Airship” was in some ways a tiny window into a vast, vivid imaginary world just waiting to be realized. Urged by colleagues, he decided to turn it into a novel . . . but ran into some challenges along the way. “I thought I was well into it at one point, but then I realized it was broken. So I (literally) dissected the novel. Broke it down into its bits and realized I had three works in there. . . . But now I think I have a sufficient handle on it to finally make a go of it. I’m muscling through chapter three as we speak.” Bottom line: When it comes to dealing with story problems, recalcitrant characters, plot holes, and writer’s block, having a bigger bag of tricks goes a long way.
The psychological aspects, however, can be a little trickier. Karin Lowachee, author of The Gaslight Dogs, recommends accepting and even embracing challenges as part of the process. “All of those mishaps and frustrations occur so you can make your work better, and that’s ultimately what I want. I will do anything to make the work better. In fact, to make the work the best thing I’ve written up to that moment. That’s always the goal. I don’t look at writing as a means to just write. I look at it as a means to improve my writing. And in that sense, I welcome the frustrations and process.”
Tobias Buckell agrees: “Grit has always been my way through.” But it certainly hasn’t been easy; he’s conquered a lot of challenges along the way. “I was never the kid everyone pointed to and said, ‘That guy is going to be a full-time writer.’ I had dyslexia, ADHD, and horrible spelling issues. I got bad grades. I mean, yeah, I read a lot, but I had a lot of work to do. I started out fumbling, and I’ve just been trying to iterate something slightly better over and over again (and often not succeeding). Every artist has their own methods, but I try to finish even an uneven project, because for me a crappy existing draft is better than the most perfect nonexistent thing I’ll ever write.”
So when the going really gets tough, what to do? Kit Cox has a somewhat offbeat suggestion: Legos. “Any problem can be made better with Legos,” he says. “If you can’t make stuff with Legos, then Google Image ‘Steampunk Lego’ and just smile.”
If Legos don’t work for you, however, try Suna Dasi’s approach: “A lot of tea and swearing. But always going back and trying again.”
Seven Pieces of Advice for New Writers
1. “Seek originality. It’s your duty to innovate, to be different, to tell a new story in a new way. And don’t tell me originality is dead. You’re just being too lazy or too scared of failing life.”
—Jacques Barcia
2. “Every writer works differently. But often I think that the big idea must be put aside in favor of the word, the sentence, the paragraph. Let the LANGUAGE and the CRAFT lead you to the idea: Where you end up will likely be something more vital than the notion with which you began. I think of writing as a means of exploration; it’s worthwhile because you don’t know exactly what’s out there.”
—Jedediah Berry
3. “My own practical experience was to keep it focused, at least to begin with. The Bookman is one hero, one point of view. Having just the one character helped me keep it more grounded, to see the world through one set of eyes, to explore it gradually. By The Great Game, I allowed myself three different braiding stories, but by then I had a better idea—I hope!—of what I was doing. Always look for the personal story. World-building is cool but it doesn’t make a novel, it makes a manual. And have fun! I think that’s the most important thing you can do.”
—Lavie Tidhar
4. “Whatever your process, just do it at some point. DON’T GIVE UP if you have a passion for that idea. Don’t be intimidated by big ideas. This is why knowing yourself as a person and as a writer is so important. You won’t know otherwise when the ‘right time’ is. I have grand ideas, but I know I’m not a good enough writer to tackle them yet. And that’s perfectly all right. I’ll work on other things until I’m at that point.”
—Karin Lowachee
5. “Don’t be afraid of ‘not being original.’ Because, c’mon, this is Steampunk first of all, which is so derivative and full of tropes that you should not be afraid to engage them in your work at first. Just don’t be afraid to break away from these tropes, either.”
—Diana Pho
6. “I’m a big fan of forcing yourself to START creating, and just working and working till you have something in front of you—and, yeah, that something is probably awful, but now you can rework it, reshape it, make it into something good, and you don’t have all that pressure to start anymore. That’s a lot of pressure. If someone is stuck on just a big picture or concept and doesn’t have an idea for characters or plot, then I’d say try to find a small moment or image, symbolic of the big idea, and start there. Just write it. Then keep writing. Or, if that doesn’t work, just steal something from Shakespeare.”
—Lev Rosen
7. “Sometimes, you JUST have to get out of your own way. In a certain chapter in Here, There Be Dragons, I needed a talking animal to drive a steam-powered car—an animal I hadn’t really planned out. I picked a badger, because talking badgers are cool—and he was so much fun to write. By the time I got to the third book in the series, not only was he still around, but one scene had twenty talking badgers on a fire engine. Who knew?”
– James A. Owen
Images are essential to great fiction, and fiction for centuries has been accompanied by images, sometimes definitively (what would Sherlock Holmes be without Sidney Paget’s pictures?). When images are approached creatively, with the writer seeking out the details, the missing links, and the odd associations, they can be potent sources of inspiration. The idea is not to illustrate the illustration but to let it fuel and spark imagination.
To that purpose, we’ve provided the painting on this page and a collection of writing exercises. The painting depicts a rather retro-futurist scene, but the exercises do not require a specific genre, because the imaginative work necessary for this sort of inspiration is common to most fiction writing. Let your visions wander where they will.
Some exercises will lead you to create raw material (the writerly equivalent of doodles and sketches), while others may lift you toward an entire poem, story, novel, or novel sequence. Some of the exercises may help with particular skills (characterization, worldbuilding), while others simply promote healthy imaginative habits. They’re not presented in any particular order; rather, they are a toolbox, a paintbox, a toybox—a cabinet of curiosities waiting for you to try something unexpected.
Write a newspaper report about this international aviation event.
Who is riding in the blimp? Where do they come from, and what did they expect to see today? Are they enjoying their ride so far?
A famed poet sailed in one of the balloons that day, and the rest of the poet’s career was devoted to commemorating all that happened. Transcribe the poet’s poems, or provide brief excerpts in a critical study.
Describe the landscape below the image.
Several highly literate birds were present that day, though they are not visible in the picture. Some of them went on to sell their stories to the tabloid press. Write one of those stories.
In the next thirty-seven seconds, three things will happen at once in this scene. What are they?
After the event depicted in this image, more postcards were mailed than at any other time in many years. Write a selection of the most interesting postcards sent that day . . . and at least one of the least interesting.
Who is the shark escaping from? Explain.
The shark was known for speaking in fragments and riddles. This, it was later discovered, had an important scientific purpose. What was it, and why was it so important on the day the shark flew among the balloons and dirigibles?
One of the world’s greatest opticians studied the event depicted here and made extraordinary advances in the science of lenses and vision afterward. Why? Tell the story.
Art historians long considered this painting (rumored to be the work of Wallace Tilling-hast) to have been lost. Little was known about it until it was recently discovered in the basement of a library in Budapest. How did it get to that library, and why was it never discovered before now? How does it change our understanding of the work of Tillinghast? Why did so many newspapers refuse to report the discovery? Where is the painting now?
The colors in this painting are mostly not accurate to the event, or so some art critics argue. The painter left a confession in which the coloring was explained, and this caused some critics and viewers much anger. Write that confession.
This painting was made after the painter’s father related a story he had been told by an itinerant accountant in a remote tavern quite a few years before. Write that story.
This image is most famous for being in a popular advertisement. Write the text for that advertisement.
The man in the foreground of this picture was not at all responsible for what happened to him. Indeed, his story is one of the most amazing tales of being in the wrong place at the wrong time that has ever been told. Tell that story.
Beards are considered highly subversive personal statements in this world. Why is that, and why is the man in the foreground bearded?
The man in the foreground of the picture was well known for having failed at every business venture he attempted before the one great success that brought him here. The nature of that success, though, is in dispute. Write an interview with two Wikipedia editors who keep rewriting the man’s Wikipedia entry.
For many years, this painting hung upside-down in a museum. No one complained. Why not? What caused the museum finally to turn the painting around?
Every object you see in this picture is, to some extent at least, conscious and sentient. Transcribe the thoughts of the item that you are most surprised to discover has thoughts.
A team of aviation engineers gathered to study this image. Their conversation went awry, and led to at least one demand for a duel. Write the conversation.
Certain people have claimed that this image illustrates a scene from a lost play by William Shakespeare. Tell the story of how the play came to be written, how it came to be lost, and how some particularly obsessive scholars have tried to locate and authenticate it.
A little-known children’s book attempted to tell the story of this image through the eyes of a hedgehog. Write a chapter from that book.
List seven important objects that are not included in this picture. Write a short story in which all of those objects play a pivotal role in how events turn out.
Write an essay in which you explain how this image is subtly alluded to by five works of literature that no one else has yet realized refer to it.
If this image were included in an elementary textbook on biology, what chapter would it be in? What page? Write that page.
A mysterious stranger once walked into a small art gallery, looked at this picture, and then promptly began screaming in a language no one has yet been able to identify. Tell the story of this stranger.
Several popular works of historical fiction have used the scene depicted here as a climax to their plots, though each work has been vastly different in tone and purpose from the others. Write short passages from each of those historical fictions.
While the events depicted here were deeply important to many things that would come later, something was happening seventeen miles away that may have been even more consequential, though it didn’t seem so at the time. Tell that story.
Matthew Cheney’s work has been published by English Journal, One Story, Web Conjunctions, Strange Horizons, Failbetter.com, Ideomancer, Pindeldyboz, Rain Taxi, Locus, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, and SF Site, among others, and he is the former series editor for Best American Fantasy. He has taught Writing at Plymouth State University and the University of New Hampshire State.
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FANTASTIC VICTORIANA: ALTERNATIVE HISTORY EDITION.
DETROIT INSTALLATION. Art installation, as a relatively recent addition to the forms in which art is made, remains, if not controversial, then at least relatively less respected than other art forms.
Art installations have traditionally been an attempt to overcome art’s limitations: its commodification—no such commodification of an installation can be created, because once an installation is disassembled and dispersed it is completely gone; art’s privileging of the role of museums and galleries—installations often take place outside of them, and further become part of the whole space, a subject, rather than an object within that space; art’s privileging of remote viewing, since installations reject the traditional concentration on one object in favor of a consideration of the relationship between a number of competing or complementary elements; and the Wordsworthian “emotion recollected in tranquility,” as installations are designed to force the viewer to engage in a heightened, immediate bodily experience of the work. Traditional art objects are passive; art installations are active.
A case in point is the “Detroit Installation,” a.k.a. “The Naked Launch.” Created by Emily Wagner, with assistance by Jake von Slatt, and loosely based on William S. Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch, the Detroit Installation took place in Detroit, Michigan, over Memorial Day weekend, 2013. Occupying nine square blocks of the suburb of Chaldean Town, the Detroit
Installation was a devastating indictment of American foreign policy in artistic form.
Similar to Tyree Guyton’s “Heidelberg Project,” the Detroit Installation consisted of a three-by-three square block area, transformed into an unidentified foreign urban location. Carefully-placed rubble and the shells of burned-out cars crowd the streets, and those buildings in the Installation area which were not already rubble or abandoned hulks have been re-shaped to create a more generally Middle- and Near-Eastern urban landscape.
Viewers are given the choice of entering a building, located blocks away in downtown Detroit, or entering the Installation streets. Those entering the building are given name-tags reading “Annexian/Mugwump/Subject.” They are also given control of dirigible drones, altered into a “steampunk” appearance by von Slatt, and steam-powered robotic “Liquefactionists,” and allowed to strafe the streets, and the other viewers, at will with paint balls of varying sizes.
Those entering the streets are given “Freeland/Object” name-tags and Victorian vests, top hats, goggles, and Empire coats and are let loose in the installation. Viewers are forced to traverse the littered, pseudo-Iranian or pseudo-Afghani streets while enduring a barrage of red paint balls from the Annexian/Mugwump/Subjects. The impact of these paintballs does no permanent damage but assuredly stings. The viewer can pass through or by the “wedding,” the “marketplace,” and the “University” before reaching the “end” of the installation, Dr. Benway’s “White” “House.”
Most art critics judge installations on five planks: site-specificity, temporality, cerebrality, interactivity, and internal process. The Detroit Installation is profoundly successful on four of these.
The Detroit Installation’s site-specificity is superb. The Installation uses the body of the audience—traditionally meaning the interactive immersion of the viewer, but in the Installation a quite literal experience—and the body of the physically ruined suburb of Chaldean Town to incisive effect. The Installation has no discernible physical narrative, apart from the geometric floor plan. There is no focal point within the Installation, and the wedding, marketplace, and university are all unassertive. The confusion between the space of “reality” (Detroit) and the space of subjective construction (“Interzone”) works to activate and decenter the viewer, creating a verfremsdungeffekt from the viewing experience itself.
All installations are temporally limited in ways that “permanent” art (paintings, statues, even palimpsests) is not—but as Freud wrote, “a flower that blossoms for a single night does not to us seem any less lovely.” The temporality of the Installation extends along a different vector than many other art installations. Wagner’s use of von Slatt’s steampunk devices, from the dirigible drones to the robotic paintball guns of the Liquefactionists to the paint-spraying IEDs on the streets, extends her critique across empires and centuries, condemning modern American foreign policy and Victorian Britain’s empire-making.
Cerebrality emphasizes the concept of the installation over its impressionismus, the arousing of emotions in the minds of the viewer—as Marcel Duchamp emphasized with his urinal, the idea is the important element of the art, not the ephemeral emotions aroused or the material object of the art. While some critics define aesthetic enjoyment as the combination of cerebrality and the emotions aroused in the viewer’s mind, the Detroit Installation places the emphasis on the idea of the Installation, rather than on emotions. The emotions viewers experience, as Mugwump/Subjects or Freeland/Objects, are entirely negative, while the idea of the Installation—its critique—brings forth more positive ideas and inspirations.
On interactivity the Detroit Installation strikes an uneven balance. Those viewers who take the Mugwump/Subject route control the Installation and to an extent the Freeland/Object viewers via the dirigible drones and the Liquefactionists. Those viewers who choose to become Freeland/Objects are objects, to be acted upon, although some of von Slatt’s creations in the Interzone—the clockwork Mosque, the brass Clock, the geared Guitar, the platformed Bus—allow for limited Object volitionality. Implicitly Wagner forces viewers to take a choice between being actors and being acted-upon, and while this emphasizes her point about drone strikes and US foreign policy it also creates an emotional frustration for many viewers—which does, however, further enhance the verfremsdungeffekt and force those viewers to question both themselves and their political behavior.
The internal process—the physical matter of the installation itself, and how it functions—is superb. Wagner and von Slatt use a combination of elements to assault the viewer’s taste, smell, touch and hearing. Besides the inevitable clouds of coal smoke and the constant sound of gears turning, von Slatt also modified pipe organs to create 18 Hz. infrasound, the frequency at which sound causes humans to feel uneasy and experience mild headaches and even hallucinations—thus adding to the hallucinatory effect of Burroughs’s work combined with Wagner and von Slatt’s reality.
JESS NEVINS
