Category Archives: On Writing

Heat Wave: Afterwords

Posted by natechen on

Early comic books have been described as assimilationist fantasies. That’s really not a bad summation of the era that brought us the catch phrase “truth, justice and the American Way.”

Many of the early comic book artists and writers were Jews, struggling to make ends meet and find acceptance in a country and in an era that were not particularly hospitable to outsiders. So it’s not surprising that the idea of being different permeates the early and middle era of superheroes. Superman and Wonder Woman were the ultimate outsiders, coming from totally alien cultures. Later, Marvel’s X-Men would take the idea of outsiders and move it to a slightly more human level. Of course, this tradition before the Second World War and the civil rights movement came along and changed many people’s perspectives on ethnicity and culture.

Now, everything is better, right?

Well, not exactly. You see, one of the things that was emphasized, and became overemphasized, in these assimilationist morality tales was that we are all the same. That’s a great sentiment, and on one level it’s certainly true. What makes us human or not human is not a matter of skin tone, culture or social standing. The problem is, while we’re quite confident about what doesn’t define humanity, we’re a lot sketchier on what does. Most people don’t give the whole issue a lot of thought and a lot of very smart people argue about it but it sometimes seems like today’s culture has chosen sameness as our defining characteristic. We’re all human after all, right?

So there’s a lot of hand wringing over making people “equal” where equal equates to us all having the same experiences. We want everyone to go to the same kinds of schools with the same ethnic mixes, get the same higher education and have all the same opportunities. The problem is, that kind of lifestyle is not very… shall we say, ergonomic?

From the moment kids arrive at school they’re presented with a number of boxes. Square classroom, square desk, square meals. Pile it all up for twelve years and you can move up to square cubicles in square buildings belonging to square corporations. And this might even be a great thing if people were invertebrates that could readily conform themselves to whatever environment they were put in. They could have total security and contentment for their entire lives. The problem is, people are individuals with very significant differences of circumstance and personality. Perhaps most importantly, they want to be different. It’s even possible that they were meant to be different, so that they could grow by understanding each other.

Some people will fit nicely into the square lifestyle our culture offers them. Some will be a tad cramped, but they’ll learn to adapt. However, there’s evidence of an ever-growing body of people who just can’t or don’t want to adapt to what culture offers them. They can’t keep up with it, or aren’t motivated by it and want to find meaning outside the existing structure. Once upon a time, that was fine. Many different kinds of societies flourished in America, from the Quakers and Shakers to various communes and the Moravians, all different kinds of social structures used to exist in America with little comment. Sure, they were ethnically similar and based primarily on European culture, but they lived and thought in very different ways.

In contrast, modern education places an emphasis not on giving people ideas to think about, but rather teaching them how to think. People from outside the cultural status quo, who don’t accept the ways they’re told to think, receive a kind of polite condescension, assuming they’re not view as outright freaks. (As a homeschooler I know of which I speak – people always seem so surprised to find I’m not a total social misfit or some kind of raving lunatic who’s trying to restore feudalism. “Homeschooled? But you seem so normal!” At first it was funny. Then it got annoying. I’m starting to worry that it’s a sign of serious cultural closed-mindedness.)

If you can’t hack it in school, you must need medication or new parents. If you don’t care to work for the corporations or the unions, if you want to work for yourself, then obviously you’re an antisocial isolationist. Herbal medicine instead of pharmaceuticals? How unscientific! And on and on it goes.

There could be, are being and have been many books on the subjects of education, business and culture, how the pendulum has swung so far away from individual thought and so far towards mandating a single culture of uniformity. Heat Wave is not one of those books.

Rather, Heat Wave is a dissimilationist fantasy – it creates a world where people are different in a culture much like our own. When they try to use their differences, they run smack into a world that doesn’t want them there. Some will try to change it slowly. Some will try to ruin it. And some will try to change it unilaterally, regardless of the consequences.

But all of them struggle with the same idea. The world they live in wants them to be the same. It needs them to be different; as much as they themselves need to be different. Of course, being different isn’t always a good thing, sometimes those different people will cause harm to themselves and others.

So there are people who are different. The society we have created doesn’t suit them, and sooner or later their incompatibility with it is going to cause problems. What do we do about it?

Well that, my friend, is a whole different story altogether…

Due Respect

Posted by natechen on

If you’re going to do anything with the idea of superheroes, and you live in the US, then the first thing you must do is decide how you are going to handle Superman.

The Last Son of Krypton is an American icon, famous around the globe for his unmatched strength, in body and moral character. This month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of his first appearance. Since then, the Man of Steel has been joined by legions of other heroes with extraordinary abilities, characters created by both his own publishing house and their rivals at Marvel. Every conceivable archetype has been filled – soldier, detective, mercenary, scholar, teacher, wizard and countless others. But in spite of the objections that his creed or powers or character are too simple,  Superman was, and in many minds still is, the first and most prominent superhero in existence.

Different stories with superheroes deal with Superman in different ways. The character was never created because there were real superheroes in the world already. The character was written about but is referenced only in passing. There’s someone with the abilities and character of Superman (a Superman analog) who exists in the world already, and thus the world didn’t need a fictional version. Or the story takes place before the Superman story existed or had enough popularity to be widely known. There are almost as many different solutions to the Superman issue as there are stories about superheroes. But if superheroes are your theme, then sooner or later Superman gets a nod of some sort.

Part of that is basic human nature. People want to see the things they like and they like to see those things in new and different lights. This is the origin of a thousand Star Wars vs. Star Trek and DC vs. Marvel geekfests. But it’s also due to the fact that there is nothing new under the sun. Many early superheroes have their origins in Jewish history and traditions, which are rife with decidedly superhuman goings on. But the American cultural legacy doesn’t include much in the way of superhuman activity- except, of course, for Superman and his ilk. So we expect something analogous to Superman to serve as the foundation for similar traditions in fiction.

And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that.

Superman is the embodiment of the flying brick archetype, founder of the garish superhero costume tradition and epitome of the hiding in plain sight tactics so many superheroes favor. When Siegel and Schuster first put Clark Kent together they created something truly enduring, and since the typical American will always associate Superman with superheroes in some way, if they plan to write in the superhero genre then they owe it to themselves and to their readers to be ready to say something about Superman.

In the Project Sumter universe Superman and other superheroes are problematic figures. While all the luminaries of the DC and Marvel lines exist there, for a myriad of reasons they’re not going to be referenced much by name. However, astute readers have probably already caught on to the fact that Helix, and many other talents, don’t like the portrayal of superheroes in American comics much, if only because they create so many untrue, and potentially dangerous ideas of what talents are and how they work. (There will be much more on this theme in Water Fall than there has been in Heat Wave. Assuming I remember it and can find the space.)

On top of the misconceptions many people will have about talents vs. superpowers, there’s the little fact that many superheroes are vigilantes, something that Project Sumter actively discourages. The government doesn’t just want private citizens to stay off it’s turf and not make them look bad – the fact is, a single individual, operating independently, is limited in their reach, their effectiveness, their knowledge of what’s going on and how to best deal with it and in their ability to contain dangerous situations and keep them from endangering others. Solo crime-fighting as a hobby just isn’t going to work very well, even if you do have a genius IQ and incredible funding. Vigilante crime-fighting teams are starting to look dangerously like an extragovernmental army and giving them all powerful and difficult to anticipate abilities doesn’t make things look any better.

As I worked on building Project Sumter’s world I kept pushing hard against the typical superhero ‘flying brick’ mentality. Most talents are as vulnerable as normal people to normal dangers and their powers have more limits and potentially bad side effects than those used by comic book superheroes. One reason was that I wanted powers that clearly acted as some poorly understood addendum to known laws of physics. But another was, the farther I was from stock superheroes the less I had to worry about fighting Superman’s shadow.

That’s not to say that he hasn’t gotten a nod or two. When you’re playing around in territory that has been heavily trod before you, the founders and trailblazers of that archetype in your culture deserves your respect. Part of that respect is finding your own way to tell your stories and part of that is giving you defining stories and characters their due respect.

Sorting It All Out

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When you’re writing it’s important to keep everything sorted and in a place where you can quickly find it, in case you need some previous note, essay, chapter or short story for reference. It’s also important to have ‘graveyards’, places to store unused ideas or bits of story that got cut from one place but might have a use somewhere else. Keeping all of that straight is a real challenge.

Fortunately, the electronic world has made all that a little bit easier. At least you don’t have to muck around with actual paper files, sorting can be done with a bit of dragging and dropping and you can back everything up in the cloud, to reduce the chances of loosing something in an accident at home or just through simple careless clicking.

Having a good filing system is important. But presenting things in a clear and concise way is just as important. If you have more than one set of stories you’re presenting, make sure people can tell which is which. As I mentioned when I talked about titles, sometimes you can do that just by how you name your stories. You may choose to give an overarching story a single title and give each installment a subtitle. Maybe you’ll just number your books, or combine some aspect of all three of those options. But whatever you do, the burden is on you, the author, to make sure your audience can clearly tell what stories go where.

It’s not fatal to you if things are a little muddled, and that’s especially forgivable at the beginning if you’re not sure exactly where you’re going or what’s going to catch on; but, especially once you’ve been running for a while, it can be a turn off for new readers if they can’t tell what goes where and in what order.

And on that note, it’s time to mention a few changes that are happening around this blog as regards categories. When I started this blog it was with the primary intention of pushing the Project Sumter stories and possibly occasionally mentioning other things I’m working on. But, as you’ve probably already gathered if you’ve read my six month’s forward post, I’m planning to introduce a few other sets of stories on here in the new future. Simply put, my plans for the blog have changed.

The fiction index page remains, and I’ll keep putting new settings and the related stories in there. Each setting will have a listing of all short stories (and novels, if any get written) I’ve written in that setting, in the order they are written. Also, I plan to have every Heat Wave chapter (and every novel chapter in the future) contain a link to the previous and next chapters, to make navigating back through them easier for new readers.

I’m also redoing categories a bit. Since this blog was originally just intended for Sumter stories the two major categories for fiction were serialization, I intended to have a subcategory for Heat Wave. Each following novel would have it’s own subcategory and then maybe there could be a section for short stories. That was a good enough plan for the beginning, but with new worlds and new settings coming into play that plan is not going to cut it. I’d like to keep the basic structure but expand it. So the serialization category is going the way of the dinosaur (I’ll still be using it as a tag, though). Instead, there will be separate categories for each set of stories (Project Sumter, Weavers of the Heartlands, ect.) and each category will have subcategories for short stories, and for any serialized novels that are posted here.

Whew. Clear as mud? Well, poke around the Fiction Index some and watch over the next few weeks. I hope to structure this blog so the only barrier to getting caught up is how much material there is to read. If you see something that hinders that goal, please, please, please let me know. A writer’s job is to get the story to the audience and if you can’t find it, then I’m not doing my job. And I don’t want that.

Author’s Obligations: Respect

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“The New York Times arrives on your doorstep and shouts at you, ‘Are you a decent person? Are you a good citizen? Are you smart? Then you will read me.’ The Post has no such presuppositions.” 

– Tucker Carlson, on the difference between the New York Times and New York Post

There aren’t that many different things you can point to and say, “An author needs to do this.”  Writing is more an art than a science, so there’s definitely a lot more wiggle room for interpretation than in many other professions. Of course, obligations goes beyond getting training and studying the field. Qualifications is separate from obligations.

When I started writing these posts, I thought I could cover all the conceivable obligations of an author in one sitting. As it turns out, it took four. First, the author and the audience. Then, the author and the story. The first two were tied together with enrichment. The last… well, we’ll get to that in a second.

For the author, respect is assuming that the audience can read your story and be enriched by it.

Okay, so this sounds incredibly simplistic. And it is. It’s entirely possible that you will never have any difficulty fulfilling this obligation, particularly as a fiction author. For those of us who are on the bottom of the stack, and I’m guessing that’s most of you although if Stephen King is reading this I’d certainly love to hear from him, assuming that you need to do everything you can to get your reader’s attention and sell them on reading your story seems like a natural thing. After all, when you’re an unknown you can’t expect total strangers to invest in your book sight unseen. But in the publishing industry there is sometimes a subtle but strong undercurrent of condescension or outright superiority in tone and content.

The quote at the top of this post speaks to this attitude. On the one hand, The New York Times is a very old, well established newspaper. On the other hand, the fact that something is well established does not, in and of itself give it a stance of moral superiority. Neither does the fact that the editors are graduates of Ivy League colleges or the fact that they are trained journalists who are routinely given access to the highest levels of power in the nation and sometimes in the world. No matter how lofty your pedigree or connections, no matter how you think your studies and training have equipped you to observe and write, none of these things make your audience obligated to read what you have written. Your skill in turning a phrase or affecting people’s emotions does not make your work a necessary part of a healthy lifestyle. In short, you must earn the attention of your readership, you cannot demand it or worse, feel you are entitled to it.

Respect is showing your audience that you are approaching them as equals, as people who are able to read and understand what you have written, who don’t need their hands held through every point of the story or need to be beaten over the head to find the “correct” interpretation of characters or events. This doesn’t mean you throw things at your audience that you know they can’t deal with. No one expects eight year-olds to understand calculus, but a good mathematician doesn’t hold that against them. Likewise, you must accept your audience for what they are and speak to them where they are. That is respect.

Respect is also accepting that not every story is for every audience. This is a particularly egregious fault of the so-called ‘literary’ author, who feel that their stories must be written and read or something is fundamentally missing from society. The burden is on you, as an author, to write stories that speak to your audience where they are. It’s okay to have a clear cut idea of what you want your story to be about or what point you want it to make when you sit down to write it. That, after all, is the foundation of enrichment (more on that in a second), but if you’re not taking the steps to understand your audience and making it relevant to them you’re not showing respect.

Finally, while you can offer your audience anything you want as enrichment, you can show them any kind of work from the depressing but eye-opening 1984 to the exciting and mind sharpening adventures of Sherlock Holmes, but whether the audience takes away what you give them or not is up to them. You have to leave the decision of whether your story was worth their time in their hands – after all, you wouldn’t want a chef telling you how much you enjoyed your meal, would you? The work of an author is much the same. It may be a good and vital part of a reader’s life, but they’re also entitled to decide what they make of it. Authors have to respect that.

In short, you audience is there to receive solid, entertaining and meaningful stories from you. Your job is to write the best story you can and let them decide if it meets those criteria. When they know that you’ve done that, then that is respect.

Depth

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Ah, depth. It’s one of the three dimensions, a measurement of how far from the visible surface an object extends. It’s also a measure of how seriously a person should be taken. And it’s one of the most important aspects of a story the author can consider, but one that’s rarely discussed. So what is depth, to the writer?

In terms of how you write stories, depth is actually a mix of the two.

The depth of your relationship with another person is the total of a lot of things. How long you’ve known them, how much you’ve learned about them in that time, how committed you are to understanding them, how well your personalities match and on and on. The deeper your relationship with that person, the more things you share with them. Most relationships begin with brief conversations or fun times. They grow to encompass shared efforts and rough patches, reminiscences of shared experiences or revelations of the past. Eventually, you have a deeply committed friendship or intimate romance.

But what happens if someone tries to skip all that build up and go straight to the commitment or intimacy? Well, usually you go out and get a restraining order, because that’s just creepy. The relationship doesn’t have the depth to handle it.

A relationship is a lot like a container. If it’s not deep enough to hold what you’re trying to put in it, the excess will spill out and cause a mess. That doesn’t necessarily mean legal injunctions, but hurt feelings, misunderstandings and, yes, outright creepiness can result, just to name a few possibilities. While the measuring and assessing of depth isn’t quite the same for storytelling, the basic principle is sound.

Back when I talked about enrichment, I mentioned this idea. If you try to put significant ideas and concepts into a story that lacks depth those ideas aren’t going to have anything to hold them, and you’ll come out as preachy, flat or just plain ol’ dumb. Your story needs to have a strong connection with your reader to carry your themes and the story itself, or you might as well just go and write an essay (Walden Two, I’m looking at you.)

Depth for your story is built in pretty much the same way you build depth in a relationship. Let the reader get to know your characters, listen to them talk, experience a few ups and downs and generally get comfortable with them. Then, and only then, are you ready to start hitting them with the hard stuff. Don’t start your story with the heavy background, start at a point that shows your characters at their best advantage. Don’t try and explain all the action at first, let your readers decide they want to know what’s going on by giving them hints to draw them in.

Of course, balancing what your readers are ready to know with giving them enough to make the story work is an art and not a science and you’re likely to wiff on it a lot before you get it down. There’s also no great writing exercise for creating depth in your stories, if there was you’d probably see it more in writing books or magazines. Verisimilitude is a similar concept, but only relates to making characters and situations seem believable.

Finding the touchstones that create deep and engrossing stories is a matter of a lifetime of reading. But you won’t be able to write deep stories just by reading. My suggestion is this: If you want to write a deep story, start by finding a story you found with particularly rich themes. Then read it again (I know, hard work, right?) Write down every moment where you feel you got a better understanding of a character or theme in the story. Then transform that into the outline for a story of your own. You may not ever write that story yourself, in fact, unless the story is fairly short or you have a lot of free time I wouldn’t recommend it at all, but just the process of building that new story in your head should give you a better grasp on what you like in a deep, enriching story.

Genrely Speaking: Space Opera

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If you’ve already read my first post on genres you may have already realized that the genres I’m talking about are not what you’re going to find in your typical library or bookstore. That’s because those genres are incredibly broad and ill-defined. For example, both steampunk and space opera can usually be found under the science fiction genre (or worse, under the sci-fi/fantasy genre) but, as we’re about to see, they’re wildly different kinds of stories.

So, how do we know a space opera when we see one? What are the forms and stylistic hallmarks of this genre?

1. It takes place in the future, often the far future, when mankind has traveled to and settled large parts of the galaxy. There’s almost always some kind of an empire, although it’s not necessarily owned and operated by humanity, and alien races that just can’t get along with humanity. Don’t expect the aliens to be too, you know, alien though. They’re probably analogs human cultures, belief systems or even corporations, used to give the reader a degree of removal from whatever is about to be said about them.

2. The struggle is political or sometimes ideological. If there are physical or military aspects of the conflict it will be quite clear that they are subordinate to whatever the major, galaxy spanning conflict is. In other words, it’s called space opera for a reason. The stories are big, lavish and about a subtle as a brick. Space opera is about the big, world-shaking stuff, and while there can and often are subthemes of romance (or other personal storylines) that’s not where the emphasis lies.

3. Technology is a prop or eyecandy, a part of the culture as opposed to a driving force. This is no small part of what sets space opera apart from other major forms of science fiction. Where many kinds of sci-fi focus on technology and progress, space opera is more a morality tale in new clothing, trying to jolt us out of our preconceived notions and into thinking about the world in a new way.

Generally, when people think of sci-fi space opera is what they think of. (And by that I mean Star Wars.) While there’s more to sci-fi than that, it’s still the most prominent.

What are the weaknesses of space opera? It’s tendency to create caricatures of people or groups of people is definitely a strike against it. When it’s not tweaking details to get it’s point across there can be full-blown unfortunate implications. In the hands of the careless, space opera is a dangerous thing. Also, in the midst of all that epic, space-faring action the importance of the individual character and his decisions can be lost, and much of the impact of the story with it.

What are the strengths of space opera? Quite frankly, a lot of people, myself included, find it cool. The scope most space opera reaches, along with the high quality special effects and tendency to memorable, over the top characters makes for great reading or watching.

As an author, space opera also gives you one of the best chances you’ll ever have to do some large scale world and culture building. (I haven’t written about culture building yet, in part because I haven’t done much of it myself. There’s also not much about it out there, which is a shame.)

But most of all, space opera is a great opportunity for fun, and there’s surprisingly little of that in sci-fi. If you have a space opera series you really love, whether in print or on the silver screen, share it in the comments. I’d love add a new title or two to my sci-fi reading list.

Inspiration

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Inspiration for writing comes from a host of places. Where you get your inspiration from will probably be as varied and unique as what you choose to write about. But it’s still important that you get out there and find your muse.

For the writer, inspiration is something that helps you find the right words to fit what you want to express. It’s not a crutch, you certainly shouldn’t need it every time you sit down to write. But knowing what helps the ideas flow can help you overcome those times when you sit down and confront the great white expanse of paper (or word processor) and try to come up with something worth sharing.

I don’t know most of you well enough to hazard a guess at what will best inspire you. So what I’m going to do is share a few things that really help when I’m trying to find the groove to write in.

1. Listen to music. This one is probably one of the most obvious and most talked about, so I ‘m going to get it out of the way first. Listening to music is a great way to get the ideas flowing, especially if it’s music that fits what you’re trying to write or just music that you love. If you can do both, that’s pure bonus.

2. Get moving. If you’re like most people, you probably sit down on your bum in a chair (or lay down on your stomach/back) and type/write while you’re composing. Getting up for a bit fora brief walk, cleaning off your desk (WARNING: this can set dangerous precedents) or just doing some jumping jacks by your desk can get the blood moving to the ol’ brain and help the ideas flow.

3. Eat something. Low blood sugar = low brain functions. Just don’t eat so much you get drowsy, that’s counter productive.

4. Read something. This is the intellectual equivalent of #3. Have something that will keep the ideas flowing with you when you write. If you’re writing part of your story that requires a great villain, keep Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power handy and flip through it if you’re stuck. If humor’s what you need, you might keep Charles Schultz’s Peanuts or Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes on hand.

5. Talk it over.  Having a group of like-minded people who will go over ideas, share experiences and hack about new possibilities is a real boon to creative thought. If you can find a place to get that kind of input, take advantage of it.

6. Write something else. Now sometimes you just need to take a break and come back with a fresh perspective and new energy. But sometimes, in the act of writing something else you’ll write exactly what you need for the piece you were stuck on. Don’t worry about moving writing from one story or one piece to another. Usually it will be clear that what you’ve written fits better in one place than another, and if it’s not then at least you can go back to step #4.

Hopefully that’s enough to get you on your way to writing some good, solid stuff. As you scribble or type or touchscreen(?) away, pay attention to what your best ideas are and where they’re coming from. Once you get that discipline down, you’ll be able to pinpoint what your best sources of inspiration are, and then your ideas will never stop coming.

Author’s Obligations: Enrichment

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The author has many duties and responsibilities – things you must keep in mind if you really wants to be considered an author. Your audience. Your story. And beyond that, the ways your story and your audience interact.

Every story should touch the reader in some way. Determining the exact whys and hows of that is part of your job as the writer, but there are some things that it’s worthwhile to keep in mind. One of these is the idea that your story should enrich the reader.

Now before we get into this, let me be clear. Some people are going to hear that and think that what I’m saying is that stories need to be family entertainment, that anything that wouldn’t have been made in the era of black and white film is outside the bounds of good story telling. While many of my favorite movies are in black and white and I’ve nothing against family entertainment as a rule, that’s not at all what I’m saying.

Sometimes, the author needs to wander into unsavory territory if he’s going to tell a good story. This post by Brian Bixby says that stories do not always need to be uplifting. I agree with this statement. Uplifting and enriching are not the same things.

Enrichment does not mean that the person always walks away feeling good. Enrichment does not mean we always look at what is easy, or nice or likable. Being a better person is not directly proportionate to how good we feel. Stories like Animal Farm, 1984 or Brave New World are very dark and unpleasant. You hardly walk away from them feeling great about yourself. They take a hard, honest look at what people are like and what they could be doing, should we let it come to pass. And when we finish with them, we can take what we’ve learned and make ourselves better with it.

Or not, there’s always that option, too.

The point is, the author must at least offer something enrich the reader, even if the reader doesn’t want it, or else he’s just wasted the reader’s time. If a story is nothing but words on a page, read and then forgotten, the author has taken his audience’s time and left them with nothing. That’s not writing, that’s theft.

Of course, not every story has to be as challenging as Animal Farm. Humor, suspense and slice-of-life all bring something to the table, be it large or small, that give the reader something. A joke to share with friends. A tricky situation to ponder and sharpen one’s mind on. A story to share and bond over.

It’s tempting to look at the big, heavy stories and think, “I want to write something like that.” But not every story is suited to carrying such heavy stuff. Read and practice and you’ll learn to gauge how deep and heavy a story is (but that’s undoubtedly a whole ‘nother post entirely.) Practice with little stories. Write out jokes. Retell favorite moments from books in your own words. Do it over and over again.

Most of all, write with purpose. At some point in your story process, ask yourself, “When people walk away from this, what do they take with them? Is it worth the reading?”

Then, write it out until it is.

Genrely Speaking: Steampunk

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So it occurred to me in the middle of the string of steampunk spotlights I did over the last month that I never took the time to define what steampunk is. And for that matter, I throw around a lot of genre names without really saying what I think they are. This is significant, since genres, like most other non-scientific classifications schemes (and even some scientific classification schemes) are a bit vague and their definitions tend to vary from person to person.

A genre, for those who aren’t that familiar with the term, is a category of a work of fiction based on its style, form or content (according to Merriam-Websters.)

So, what are some hallmarks of the style, form and content of the steampunk genre?

1. A setting in the Victorian era, or a fictional world that mostly conforms to the social, political and economic realities of that era. In either case, an exception is made in the matter of technology. The works of H.G. Wells or Jules Verne are often used as an example. The British empire is an almost omnipresent force in steampunk novels, and very few things can replace it. It often serves as the driving force in science, exploration and economy, not to mention serving as an excellent source of political intrigue and social commentary. If Britain is not used as the setting or it’s foundation, expect to find the American West or some other frontier setting. Otherwise, you might be looking at a different genre. This idea is usually summarized with the question, “What if the future came early?”

2. An emphasis on science, progress and the resulting social and sometimes military conflict that these forces bring about. One of the biggest themes in steampunk is science. With all the change and turmoil during the Industrial Revolution, it often looked like science would swallow up everything that people had known before and leave behind a world of steam, gears and barely human creatures to oversee them (today this is known as the technological singularity and people are expecting to actually replace humanity, rather than diminish them). The benefits and drawbacks of technology will often be debated.

3. Social change. The Victorian era also saw the beginning of the labor movement and women’s rights. These themes are almost always worked into steampunk stories. And, of course, the British Empire offers a wealth of opportunities to examine the effects of empire. In some cases these things are integral to the story, in some cases they merely signify the era and in some cases these causes are actually advanced further than their historical benchmarks, to go with the theme of progress come early.

Are there drawbacks to this genre? Sure, all genres have their pros and cons. Many people think of the Victorian era as a time of great scientific progress, and it’s true that a lot of people were running around and writing down the things they saw and a lot of very useful machines were invented, but it’s also true that many of the ideas espoused in the Victorian era were flat out wrong. (Ether, to give just one example.) Yet steampunk rarely looks at what the Victorians got wrong.

Sometimes that can be retconned by taking more modern ideas and handing them to scientists who are beginning to uncover them, but that papers over the fact that science was hardly the simplistic, straightforward undertaking so many people, even today, depict it as. There were a lot of widely accepted “scientific” ideas that were flat out wrong, “theories” with no experimental support that were accepted just because they sounded right an fit the mood. Quacks exploited people with pseudoscientific medicines or treatments. Steampunk rarely tackles that particular dark side of science – it’s just not as sexy as Jekyll and Hyde or Frankenstein’s monster.

One thing that authors will probably find very appealing about steampunk is that literacy rates were fairly high in some parts of the world. The written word, we think, was valued. But if you look at the kind of writing that was being done… well, it wasn’t always that great. There was a kind of story called the penny dreadful, so named because they only cost a penny. And, as the name implies, they weren’t exactly great reading.

In short, while most people recognize that the Victorian era had its flaws, steampunk tends to idealize certain parts of it that were, in reality… less than ideal, just like all the other parts.

What are the strengths of steampunk? Steampunk is a very romantic genre. Exploration and greater understanding are incredibly powerful and captivating ideas, and steampunk puts these things at the front and center, giving the reader immediate and visceral buy-in.

Steampunk is also a great home for a large number of fun archetypes. The gentleman adventurer or scientist, or his distaff counterparts, the plucky heiress with something to prove (be it her scientific prowess, her adventuring acumen or just her general equality with men), the airship pirate, the mad scientist – the list goes on and on. It’s a lot of fun for writers and makes it a lot easier for readers to connect quickly with the characters.

Finally, there’s a great appeal to returning to what many view as a great era of history and throwing our own hurdles at them, asking ourselves how would these people have handled the problem? When that’s done right we have fiction at it’s best.

I’ve shared several steampunk tales I love, but to be honest I wouldn’t mind hearing about one or two more. Any recommendations?

A Road Map (Six Months Forward, Six Months Back pt. 2)

Posted by natechen on

So as of the beginning of April, Heat Wave has been running for six months. Last week I mentioned some of the complications that fact is already causing me, some of the decisions that I’ll have to make sooner or later, and asked for some feedback in how you might like me to handle them.

This week let’s look forward past the end of Heat Wave. I’m not 100% sure, of this writing, when that will be, but I suspect it will be sometime in May or early June. What comes after Heat Wave?

Well, for starters I have the seed of a second Project Sumter novel in the works. Circuit and Helix haven’t really been working at cross-purposes in Heat Wave, they just don’t like each other very much (mutual respect aside). Also, Heat Wave is going to leave some major plot threads hanging that I don’t want to leave unresolved for too long. However, seven or eight months of one story is a long time. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it and I know I’ve enjoyed writing it, but I also have a lot of other ideas percolating on the back burner and I’d like to share them with you.

So, for a month or two after Heat Wave is finished I intend to post several short stories on Monday, instead of novel chapters. Some of these short stories may be too long for a single week (leaning more towards 6,000-8,000 words instead of the usual 2,000-4,000 words I aim for in the usual novel “chapter) and I’ll probably wind up splitting those into two weeks of content. I’m not sure exactly how many of these there will be, but I promise not to spend more than two months on them.

At least one, possibly two or three of these stories will be set in Project Sumter’s world and will explore what some of the characters are doing in the time after Heat Wave or the early chapters of the next book. A new character or two may make a first appearance in these stories as well. The others short stories, however many there winds up being, will be stories with new characters set in new worlds. Hopefully you’ll find those stories, characters and worlds just as interesting as Project Sumter has been for you. Unless you found that to be boring so far. In which case, nothing personal but why are you still here?

Why spend two months dividing my message? Why introduce a whole bunch of new concepts before going back to the tried and true?

Well, for one thing, I want to tell these stories. The drive to write is one of the most important aspects of a writer’s life and I’d be stupid not to go where it takes me. Another is, while I have plenty ideas for short stories, ideas suited to full length novels are a little more sparse on the ground – and not all of them are Sumter stories. In fact, a minority of them are.

I want to keep telling stories long after I run out of ideas for Circuit, Helix and their merry bands. I hope you’ll come along for the ride, and to do that there’s nothing better than whetting people’s interests ahead of time.

At the same time, I do want you to stick around and see how the second book turns out. So, after finishing with the short stories I’ll take one week to do a brief introduction, as I did with Heat Wave, and we’ll start with Water Fall sometime in late July or early August. It’s been six months of hard work, but I’ve enjoyed it. I hope you have, too.