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| Professor Provine speaking at OctopodiCon '12 |
Guest
Blog by OU Grad Jeff Provine
During
summer breaks while pounding my way through OU's Professional Writing program,
I wrote steampunk novels for my the Celestial
Voyages series. I didn't know they
were called "steampunk" at the time; I always figured them to be
"Victorian science fiction."
It's sci-fi, but it's set in olden times, like Jules Verne and H. G.
Wells intended with the birth of sci-fi.
Of course, they meant it to be the present or not-too-distant future,
but there's a strong spirit of adventurism in exploration and yet a sense of
modesty, patronage, and civility that's bygone today. Little did I know that the genre was
blossoming and there was a whole world of people out there who shared my
passion.
The
idea for Celestial Voyages came from
a web fan page where somebody had made models for a sequel to H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. According to the site, the humans had
reverse-engineered the Martian technology and now were counter-invading. These models showed open-decked spaceships with
solar sails. I was aghast! Martian technology
were rocket-fired canisters. To
semi-quote Annie Wilkes, "They just cheated us! This isn't fair! THEY DIDN'T
USE COCK-A-DOODIE SAILS!" Out of
creative spite, I sat down and sketched out what a Victorian-style luxury
spaceship would need: chemical-based rockets from Chinese and Russian designs,
air-scrubbing Amazonian plants, batteries, washrooms, crew lists, food stocks, etc
etc etc. The result was the Star's Comet.
As
we've seen in the
explosion of steampunkery, invention really is the key to it all. Getting that one little iota of an idea can
make a whole world appear. People come
up with great costume designs or maybe an aether-powered ray gun, and creative
explanations add one on top of the other. Or, a guy can draw up a spaceship and then
create a crew to fill it with and worlds for it to explore.
The
two classic modes of creation follow the two greatest writers of the era (who,
by the way, weren't fans of each other).
Verne wrote his science fiction with an emphasis on the
"science." He spends entire
chapters explaining how the electrical system on the Nautilus worked and how the cannon for From the Earth to the Moon was funded. Wells, meanwhile, was more focused on the
themes of the story, dreaming up anti-gravity "cavorite" and not
detailing time-travel, just telling us what awesomeness it could show. In their feud, Verne noted that Wells'
inventions wouldn't work, while Wells said Verne couldn't write his way out of
a paper bag.
I
took both approaches for Celestial
Voyages. Being a fan of
"hard" SF, I like to know how the magic works. I have a detailed walk-through of the five
decks of the Starship, from the pilot's station down the electric elevators to
the cavernous engineering hold. Magnets
are used everywhere to keep things right-side-up, even the goats in the
zoological room that supply the adventurers with enough protein to keep
adventuring.
I
also like aliens and seeing how other societies do things in the softer
Wellsian perspective. Under the moon's
surface, caverns are filled with jungles lit by glowing, upside-down plants and
populated with ant-men who never sleep.
Venus (whose atmosphere has been changed, because having everyone die in
acid rain hot enough to melt lead would be interesting, but no way for book two
to go if there's to be a third one) is a heavily forested world ruled in
city-states where intelligent trees take "knowledge is power"
literally. Mars is an aged desert world past
its prime, running low on resources with a populace addicted to an impossibly
bureaucratic government. Every world
they cross gives the Earthlings something new to ponder.
That's
the fun of steampunk: getting to make things up and seeing where that takes
you. You never know what you'll see
invented next.
~ ~
~
Jeff
Provine is author of Celestial Voyages: The
Moon, Venus,
and Mars,
as well as YA ebook Dawn on
the Infinity. His latest story is "Where
is Captain Rook?" is one of seven in Carnival
of Cryptids, a Kindle All-star e-anthology with all proceeds going to
the National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children.
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