A Journey Into the Realm of Steam...and Goggles...and Stuff

Gaslight Gathering 4 Poster

Last weekend (May 2-4, 2014) I attended Gaslight Gathering 4, a steampunk convention. I was invited to give a 2-hour presentation on the continuing adventures of Sherlock Holmes and how he fitted into the steampunk universe on Friday, to participate in a panel on the genre of steampunk literature on Saturday, and to autograph copies of my books for an hour in the Vendor Hall. Wait, oh, you have a question, do you? Okay, well, what is it? Quickly now, out with it. After all, we have a blog to get into, so if you have any questions let's get them out of the way. Speak up, I can barely hear you. All right, that's better. What is what? What is steampunk? What do you mean, 'What is steampunk?'" Oh, very well, but you had better take notes since there will be a quiz later.

A simple answer is that steampunk is a form of science fiction based on alternate history (think Star Trek's Mirror Universe or Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle), heavily influenced by the literature on the Victorian and Edwardian eras and the technology of those periods. The real answer is a bit more elusive in that it depends on what aspect of steampunk you're talking about. As Diana Vick, longtime veteran of the Seattle steampunk scene, explained, there are three basic aspects of steampunk: 1) Literature 2) Sub-culture and 3) Aesthetic. The literature aspect is pretty much as I explained it above, and includes films like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Wild Wild West, and  20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The sub-culture is a bit harder to explain, but includes costuming, music, art, imagineering, crafting, role playing, gaming and tea dueling. For many people costuming is both their gateway into the sub-culture and the avenue of their expression. Here are a few photos taken by Ed Cavanaugh during the convention...

As you can see, the Victorian Era echoes through all these creations, and yet there is something more. For, as Diana pointed out, if everyone were just going to wear Victorian clothing, it would be nothing more than a historical reenactment group and we would all just sit down to a nice cuppa. But if you have additions like goggles and weapons, as well as accouterments from other cultures such as Japan and China, Native American tribes and France, the Wild West and Germany, not to mention vampires, zombies, super heroes and ghosts, as well as incursions from other literary genres, such as mystery, spy thriller, pulp fiction and romance, you have something more than just an afternoon stroll through Victorian London. As to the "aesthetics" of steampunk, that's more a matter of form than function, a sense of style and design. Cars, coffee makers, jewelry, washing machines, slide projectors, and houses can all be designed with a steampunk aesthetic, and really have nothing (or not much) to do with the literature or sub-culture of steampunk. And, actually, steampunk literature need not have anymore to do with steampunk sub-culture than a modern day Goth would with a Gothic novel. For more insights on the sub-culture of steampunk, please see Diana Vick's essay on the Seven Fallacies of Steampunk.

Much of how those involved with steampunk see it depends on the gateway through which they entered. I came first through literature, then by film and finally music. Long before the term steampunk was coined, I read everything written by Jules Verne, HG Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs, three authors who constantly inspire modern steampunk authors. Additionally there were Arthur Conan Doyle (whose Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger fit solidly into, respectively, the Victorian and Edwardian eras) and American writer HP Lovecraft, who wrote with a Victorian sensibility even though his stories were often set in the 1920s. And then there is Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote one of the very first works claimed by the steampunk community, "The Balloon Hoax," published in 1844. Books that also pulled me in were Michael Moorcock's Warlord of the Air (1971), Phil Farmer's The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (1973) and Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates (1983). I was attracted to those books, not because they were steampunk (there was no such term at that point) but because they dealt with alternate history themes, the idea there were worlds where history had followed different paths, a genre that has always fascinated me. Like merging roads, my interests in alternate worlds, Sherlock Holmes, Barsoom and the technological terrors of HG Wells came together in the world of steampunk.

Like many other people, I was a fan of The Wild Wild West, the CBS television show that ran 1965 - 1969, with made-for-television films in 1979 and 1980. In a sense, that show was steampunk before steampunk was steampunk. Creator Michael Garrison pitched it as "James Bond on horseback," which could easily be a description of a modern spy-themed steampunk novel, though these days the horse might be steam-powered. The steampunk sensibilities of the series were fully developed in the 1999 film version, where we have a steam-powered bicycle, a steam-powered tank, and a giant steam-powered spider striding across the landscape. Before that, though, there was 1958's The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, and 1961's Master of the World. Also on television, we had Q.E.D. (1982), the much-missed Adventures of Brisco County Jr (1993), and the even-more-missed Legend (1995) where Richard Dean Anderson played a writer of Victorian western adventures and John de Lancie an avatar of inventor Nikola Tesla.

All those books and films softened me up, so to speak, for the sub-culture of steampunk. Actually, I was quite surprised by the existence of the sub-culture. It never really occurred to me that people might dress up and live out the lives depicted in my reading material. I probably should not have been surprised, for I had known a long time about science fiction and fantasy conventions where costumes were worn, not to mention Comic-Con, where costuming was even more important. But surprised I was, and enchanted. And then I discovered steampunk-influenced music, first through the works of my friend Paul Roland, then by others like Professor Elemental, Abney Park, Steam-Powered Giraffe and Vernian Process. As you know, I've also written a steampunk novel and a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories with steampunk overtones, and am working on another of each, so it does not look as if I will escape the clutches of steampunk anytime soon. I don't know if I'll be invited to Gaslight Gathering 5 in the fall of 2015, and I don't know if I'll attend other steampunk conventions (I'm not the lone wolf type) before then, but I do know that I had a lot of fun, enjoyed meeting like-minded people, was astounded by the costumes and gadgets, and loved autographing books and participating in panels. I end with just a few of the many photos I took at the convention.

An elegant mode of travel

Boston Metaphysical Society

The Brass Wardrobe

Where are that steam-dog's goggles?

Handsome couple with handsome fezzes
celebrating Fez Friday

An airship captain, but his parrot
seems to have...tentacles?

Adam Green: "Put up your dukes, mate!"

Parasol decorating

Steam-powered skateboard

Weapons from 1873 Expedition to Mars

Rapper Poplock Holmes

Tea dueling gents

Tea dueling at its unruffled best...

Tea dueling intimidation

I don't know what it does, but it looks cool.

Old Bill

Poplock Holmes on a Pennyfarthing

Time Machine

Professor Elemental

Keep Calm and Full Steampunk Ahead

Shadows Against the Empire
An Interplanetary Steampunk Adventure

Sometimes things just do not work out according to plan. That's true for everyone, of course, but I think writers run into that maxim head-on every time they try to bring anything from the realm of ideas into material form. A case in point is my newest novel, Shadows Against the Empire. I developed the idea for the story (which was initially Darkness Against the Empire) about five years ago. As with so many of my projects, it started with a theme (steampunk) and a title, then an image -- a Martian slinking through the ruins of Old Cydonia intent upon ousting the British rulers of Mars; from that image, I developed a basic plot heavily influenced by the role-playing game Space 1889, then an outline and a list of characters good and bad with their traits. And I figured it would take me four - five months to write it.

The theme stayed, though as I went along things became more steamy, less punky and more infused with humor. The title was changed. I still have the image of hate-filled Thoza-Joran slinking through the ancient ruins, but now he's in chapter one rather than starting off the story in the prologue, and though he's still up to villainy, he's much less the villain and more a tragic victim of his own hatred. Plot and outline are intertwined for me, so what started as a simple incident-driven plot became more complex and character-driven as I interacted with my characters, and who, to tell you the truth, often refused to follow my orders and speak my dialogue -- characters are as bad as actors sometimes. As for Space 1889, the inspiration is still there, but as the characters found their own voices, so did the story, and many of the aspects of the game that I had thought to bring in no longer seemed to fit. The outline starts off clean, but page after page becomes more and more annotated; same with the character list, as some people changed, others forced their way in, and some even told me they did not like the names I had given them. As for the deadline I imposed...it took me five years to write the first 20,000 words, then two months to write the next 70,000. Funny that.

One of the major changes was in the nature of the British Empire itself. I had planned for a slightly dystopian setting. The characters would, of course, be courageous and brave, but they would be working for the often-less-than-perfect Empire, something along the lines taken by Joseph Conrad in some of his fiction, as in Heart of Darkness, my favorite story. But as I eavesdropped on my characters and observed their interactions with others, I realized that changing history had changed the Empire. The discovery of space travel had two effects on history -- the Earth was no longer the only target for the colonial powers, and the countries that would have become colonies had access to technology they could develop along their own lines (as opposed to the way we "help" people now) and thus meet would-be colonizers on a better footing. And on the planets and inhabited moons, the colonial powers of Earth met people who had been around a long time, so in most cases (especially with the British) it became less a colonial conquest and more an economic and/or political partnership. Of course, it's not perfect -- what is? -- and if the British Empire is still sowing the seeds of its own destruction, perhaps it's at least doing so more slowly. One can hope.

The Solar System of the novel is much different than our own, but more interesting for it. To create it, I looked at astronomical knowledge of the Nineteenth Century, as well as what was theorized by space scientists (not to mention me and Carlos Carrion in the high school library) through the mid-1960s. I also extensively read early science fiction stories as well as the science fantasy planetary stories so popular in the pulps. I wrote here earlier about what we used to believe about the Solar System, and here's what I came up with for the book.

• Mercury -- It rotates in such a way to keep one face turned toward the Sun, so we have a Torrid Zone, a Nightside and an inhabited Twilight (or Temperate) Zone.
• Venus -- Jungles, an extensive riparian network and seas filled with great beasts; it also has two races, the reptilian Nagas who live in jungles, forests and swamps, and a tall pale humanoid race who live in about a dozen very ancient stone cities.
• Earth -- The main difference is that my Earth has some intelligent life on it.
• Luna -- The Moon does not really appear in the book, but I think it will be inhabited. I suppose they could live underground, but if they did, how could someone exclaim "Cities on the Moon, Dad!" as I am looking through a telescope one night.
• Mars -- Ancient and inhabited by at least two races, the yellowish and taller lowlanders, and the shorter and darker highlanders. A world very much haunted by its past.
• The Outer Planets -- They did not make an appearance this time around, except for some casual references, but the planets and the moons are inhabited, and there is probably trouble brewing out there as well.

The technology of the times is steam based, and as the steam engine has made great strides in efficiency since first being discovered by Hero of Alexandria, it is unlikely the gas engine will ever appear except as an oddity. Atmospheric travel is usually with airships, but in Mars' thinner atmosphere air travel is mostly dominated by steam-fliers, though the canals are extensively used for trade. Space travel is based upon "repulsors," a type of levitation technology inspired by some of the ideas floated by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and upon engines that interact with the aether. The Aether was one of the mainstays of Nineteenth Century science, an undetectable substance that filled space and spaces between matter. It was an outgrowth of Aristotelian physics, the fifth form of matter, in addition to air, fire, water and earth; despite its antiquity and unprovability, it was used by Sir Isaac Newton to formulate the Theory of Gravity as well as Albert Einstein in Special Relativity. Even now, some physicists find it easier to explain aspects of the universe by assuming the existence of the Aether than without it.

So, that's a bit of the story behind the story of Shadows Against the Empire: An Interplanetary Steampunk Adventure. As to the story itself...well, you'll have to read the book for that. Hope you like it.

The Other Solar System

I don't know about you, but I'm rather disappointed with the way our Solar System turned out. It's totally changed from the way it was when I was a lad. Not only have the planets gotten extreme makeovers, but we don't even have nine planets anymore, Pluto having been given the boot by some narrow-minded astro-boffins; any day now, I expect poor little Mercury to get a pink slip: "Sorry, Mercury, don't get all hot under the collar, but you're just too small to play with us...go whine to Pluto and all the other asteroids."

As recently as the 1970s (I know, some of you were not even born then, but that's not my fault) our Solar System was a place of mystery and adventure, the planets not very different than they were to the pulp writers of the previous generations, who set stories in the mines of Mercury, the jungles of Venus and the canals of Mars. Modern science has ripped away the mystery of those other worlds, not only taking away the hopes for grand adventures, but making the planets, to me at least, much less interesting. You can still read the old stories by Ray Cummings and Leigh Brackett, Arthur C Clarke and Otis Adelbert Kline, or Jack Williamson and H.P. Lovecraft, but the adventure is always tempered with a measure of wistful sadness, for now they are not science fiction stories of possible (if not probable) futures, but fables or fairy tales, and while we can still derive pleasure from them, it is not an enjoyment seasoned with anticipation. I like the classic view of the planets, so when I sat down to write Shadows Against the Empire, I set the action not in the Solar System as it is, but in the Solar System as it should have been, an alternate universe where old school astronomy still ruled.

The big thing about classic Mercury is that it is (or should be) tidally locked, as is our Moon, one side ever facing the sun. The planet being in such a situation creates stable climates on both sides of the planet, one metal-melting hot, the other cold as absolute zero, both of which can be endured and exploited; more than that, however, tidal-locked Mercury has a kind of temperate band between the two extremes, a "twilight zone" where colonies can be built. Isaac Asimov (writing as Paul French) sent his protagonists onto the hot half of Mercury in Lucky Starr & the Big Sun of Mercury, as did Alan E. Nourse with "Brightside Crossing." Writer Leigh Brackett located her cities in the Twilight Zone, and had two of her main protagonists, Eric John Stark and Jaffa Storm, born there. Two writers who took on non-human inhabitants of Mercury were Arthur C. Clarke, who described a Dark Side creature in Islands in the Sky, and Hal Clement, who wrote about the Bright Side's silicon occupants in Iceworld. During the 19th Century, astronomers observed a planet even closer to the sun than Mercury and called it Vulcan, but no one ever wrote about it...oh, the planet with the pointy-eared chaps? Sorry, not the same one.

Venus was always fun to speculate about, if only because our wild guesses about what lay beneath its thick cloud cover were just as valid as those of the astro-boffins with their big telescopes. Swamps, lizard men, jungles, tempestuous oceans, trackless deserts and soaring mountains, torrential rains that made Seattle look parched, and ancient cities connected by rivers dwarfing the Nile and Amazon. Anything went because no one could penetrate those clouds. And then came that terrible day when all us Venus theorizing space cadets found ourselves in the same position as Professor Harold Hill:

Marcellus Washburn: I heard you was in steam automobiles.
Professor Harold Hill: I was... till someone actually 'invented' one!

Not only did they use radar to tell us what the planet looked like under the thick canopy of roiling clouds but those darned Soviets actually landed a probe on Venus -- it melted. So much for jungles, swamps, oceans and even the poor old lizard-men. It was no tropic paradise as Ray Bradbury and H.P. Lovecraft had promised in two of their stories. Nor could we sail our schooners around the seas of Venus to encounter pirates and sea monsters as Edgar Rice Burroughs had assured us in the adventures of wrong-way astronaut Carson Napier in the Amtor (as the natives called Venus) Series, and as ERB wannabe Otis Adelbert Kline wrote in Prince of Peril and Port of Peril. No longer could China colonize Venus for the purpose of cultivating rice, as it did in Jack Williamson's Seetee Ship. Even the dark and dangerous cities visited by Northwest Smith, where segir (Venusian whisky) is cheap and life cheaper, went up in a poof of sulfurous smoke. In an instant, Venus went from Planet Mystery to Planet Hell. Thanks, Russia.

Of all the planets to transition from the "old" Solar System to the "new," Mars was perhaps the hardest hit, if only because everyone expected so much out of it. It wasn't just that we thought it might be the abode of life, we knew it. Even though we had never seen cities there, had never actually seen the blue waters of the canals, and had never received any signals from the Martians, we knew they were waiting for us...or coming to get us, as the case may be. In the Nineteenth Century a cash prize was offered to anyone who could prove life existed on another planet...except Mars. Burroughs populated it with all manner of creatures and ancient races, making it even more interesting than Earth. So did Ray Bradbury, C.L. Moore and Robert Heinlein; theologian and sometimes SF writer C.S. Lewis made Mars the abode of angelic beings in Out of the Silent Planet. As more information was gathered about Mars, the canals, the cities, the thin but breathable atmosphere...all went the way of dreams at the dawning. Some writers struggled on, but most sighed, grabbed the latest copies of Scientific American and Astronomy, and plotted new stories that did not depend upon Martians. A final farewell, a sort of eulogy, was published by F&SF in its November 1963 issue, A Rose for Ecclesiastes by Roger Zelazny.

I don't claim that good adventure stories cannot be written in the Solar System as it now exists, for I have read many over the years, but I do claim that the "new" astronomy put an end to the planetary adventure tale as it existed for more two centuries. Now, anyone who wants to set stories on the inhabited planets of our Solar System must either use human colonists, life-forms with which we can little contact, or establish an alternate universe where things went differently, as many steampunk writers (and me) have done. Otherwise, writers looking for adventures that involve swashbuckling or derring-do must either travel to Earth's past or seek new worlds out amongst the stars.

Of course, that does not mean our neighboring planet is entirely bereft of surprises...

So were Chinese Crested dogs.

Please, no carping about this one

Like this surprises anyone!

Obviously, he took the better offer.