Future Friday: All of yesterday's tomorrows...

A bit of news to kick off our Futurific Friday post: I accepted an invitation to The Brass Screw Confederacy (brass-screw.org) in May. Brass Screw is a Steampunk event (not a convention) that takes over the idyllic seaside town of Port Townsend from time to time and has made the town a steampunk destination of sorts.

I'll be presenting a workshop on where ideas come from. The workshop, you might be amused to know, arose from a popular blogpost I wrote here called "Drinking from the font of ideas (Also Lasersharks!)" and takes participants through all the surprising ideas that can be culled from a single day's news feed and seeks to finally answer that persistent question: "Where do you get your ideas?"

Oh, I have hatched a thousand elaborate

heist scenarios dedicated to liberating

this sofa from its home at the Seattle

Museum of History & Industry...

"But wait," I hear you cry. "Howard Carter isn't really steampunk is it? Also, what does this have to do with futurism, Scott. This is Future Friday, so get cracking with the jetpacks and flying cars. I want to hear you rip on Elon Musk for nixing flying cars!"

Not a chance. Musk is basically right about the flying car thing and it depresses me to admit that, so today we're going to talk about Steampunk, and the tomorrows that we dreamt about yesterday.

Because that's what Steampunk is: futurism through different foci. We get so caught up in the trappings of the genre sometimes that I think we forget that part of things.

One important thread of Howard Carter Saves the World is the trouble wrought by a misbehaving family of time travelers whose Victorian meddling accidentally created the modern world as we know it. Their efforts to repair the timeline set up much of the plot that Howard and his friends become tangled in. The modern world as we know it is wrong, they cry. They want their tomorrow back and they're going to get it no matter how badly they mess up our present.

It's a subplot that burbles quietly in the background and will be more thoroughly examined in future stories because nothing fascinates me more than the difference between how we imagined the future and the future we ended up with.

So is it Steampunk if the setting isn't Victorian?

I'm not a big fan of genre restrictions, so for the most part I honestly don't care. However, for my money Steampunk shouldn't begin and end with the reign of Queen Victoria. The interesting bit to me isn't the airship pirates and top-hatted chrononauts. The thing that makes steampunk interesting to me is the idea of imagining a different past, a better past in which the wonders of technological advancement and inventive enthusiasm weren't saddled with the most shocking sexism, racism, and colonialism (among other appalling isms).  And then -- this is the important part for me and my story -- imagining the world of today that would have arisen from that better yesterday.

Because at some point, as storytellers, makers, and musicians, we should to move beyond the dreamy supposition of "What if the Victorians had steampowered iPhones?" and ask what a world would look like further along that timeline. So they had aetheric cell phones and flying ships and snazzy brass goggles... tell me what future that gave rise to. Because I'm not convinced that a more inclusive, more inventive version of our past would necessarily give us the dystopian worlds that most of my dieselpunk friends envision. (Dieselpunk being commonly anchored by a re-imagined World War One...)

Maybe it would. Maybe the chaos and war of the modern world was inevitable and the power of the aetheric phlogistonic manipulator arrays would inevitably give rise to a war machine that would lay waste to the world. Maybe. But one essential elements of imagining yesterday's tomorrows was the optimism that those dreams were based on. And I, for one, hold on to that. Because if you know anything about the real batsh*t crazy inventors of the actual Victorian age, you know that they were generally trying to make the world better, not tear it apart.

And I, for one, prefer that scenario.

Bandwagonpunk! Is it right for you? (Probably not)

I think I mentioned that at the last PNWA conference I heard several agents ask for steampunk stories and many in the crowd had no idea what that meant.  Because I seemed to know what steampunk was, I was asked by several aspiring authors to explain it to them so they could alter their already-written books to fit this unknown setting.

Allow me to repeat that: alter their already-written books to fit this unknown setting.

I've been pretty immersed in the genre for awhile because I was (at the time) contemplating a steampunk novel.  I answered their questions and asked my own.  Mostly I asked why they would want to do such a thing?

Because it's what they want. ("They" being accompanied by a nod toward the nearest editor or agent.)  I tried to explain that it really isn't, but I'm not sure I got much traction.  In a competitive marketplace, it is tempting to write to the current trend.  But any reputable agent or editor will tell you not to chase the trends.

And then they ask for anyone who has one to step forward.  I know, it's frustrating, but after years and years in bookstores, this much I know is true: There's no appreciable market for Bandwagonpunk.

It just seems like there is because we see so much of it, but not if you want a lasting career.  Because while I have little or no data to back it up, how many of those authors do you think earned-out their advance?  How many of them do you think put up sufficient Booksense numbers to earn a second contract?  Relatively few.

Sure, careers have been launched by following what someone else did.  It's hard to name a fantasy author who didn't get started aping Tolkien.  God knows Harry Potter made the world safe for everyone from Artemis Fowl to Percy Jackson, but those are two among a horde of also-rans.  And note that neither of the two I mentioned is a clone of the author that laid the path that got it into the bookstores.  There's a difference between "Psht!  I can write that, here's boy wizard Number 293" and "That's an intriguing idea, what can I do that's new, but fits?" 

There are probably some good authors who have tried to hook a vampire premise to their novels just to catch the coattails of Twilight and some of them even pulled it off.   But I would wager that those authors would have done just as well (if not as quickly) if they're resisted the urge to graft foreign elements into their tales.

If you are adding things that the story does not demand to fit the trappings of the current setting du jour, then I (and many of your readers) will get bored quickly.  What's more, we'll trip over the things you grafted onto the story because even the most myopic readers will realize that they're not supposed to be there.  But if the story hinges on the death of Queen Victoria and troubles with the accession of King Edward VI, or if you're making some important parallel point using the story world to mirror our own, then I'll have my bowler hat and brass goggles and be flying alongside in my airship the whole way.  (Or space helmet, diving helmet or other headgear as appropriate.)  

Seriously, I sometimes think that "Me Too" should be a genre of its own. 

I think it usually goes something like this...

"I want to write a sort of proto-King Lear with a female as the Lear character."
"That's been done to death; how are you going to make it new?"
"I'm going to set it ON A SPACE STATION!"
"No one writes space opera anymore, Steampunk's really big right now..."

Make sure to oil the axles, that bandwagon squeaks something awful and they'll hear you coming.

Okay, I'll admit that I'm being a bit snarky.  On the face of it, there's nothing really wrong with this.  Putting it in space (or steampunk London, or Narnia, or turning them all into vampires for that matter) might make an old story feel new.  Maybe.  God knows Shakespeare's been cadged in every setting under the sun.  And a good writer could make that work.  But even though making King Lear into a western sort of worked with King of Texas (kind of), it only worked because the setting suited the story and there were enough changes made to the play to carry the western motif.

But it seems to me that someone who does this is actually creating obstacles for themselves that don't need to be there unless there's some compelling reason beyond "because it's cool right now".   Unless you have an angle that demands this setting, you have a longer road to walk than your peer who is telling a story that needs to be told in that setting.  If you're gifted (or lucky) you can make this work anyway.  Unless your reason for taking your story into space or back in time is the story, it's going to feel like a gimmick and you will have to work a lot harder to make it not feel like a gimmick.  Writing is hard enough; ask yourself why you're giving yourself extra work to do.

My guiding light remains true: Elements are in service to the story, never the other way around.  When you're shifting the story to fit the elements, you have a problem.