I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again, I don’t like to research. I have a terrible head for dates and years and things.
For example, I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned that Scribbling Windhund isn’t based off the Victorian era… or even the Regency. Prussia was a nation-state in the 1700s. So when I write the story of a fashion critic in a Steampunk version of Prussia this is the height of fashion:
Friedrich the Great and Voltaire in Sanssouci (If you want to spread salacious rumors about 300 year old men, these two were totally banging.)
Since I have such a terrible memory (or such a penchant for anachronism), I have to keep really good notes. Normally, since that takes time away from actually writing the thing I want to write, I tend to be rather sloppy about it and let actual fact be damned. But Otto Lang is obsessed with fashion so, for once I couldn’t cut corners. So I actually tried to do this correctly… for you.
From what I can gather (and it’s mostly from Wikipedia) the idea was to look at tall and narrow as possible, to wear pale but bright colors, and to have curly white hair. I think, the 1700’s was the last time when men were as vulnerable as women to the whims and trends of fashion since they were peacocking it up as much as the ladies.
Men in court, at balls, and on the job would wear a three piece ensemble. Breaches (the tight shorts that stop at the knee) a waistcoat (the fancy vest) and a justaucorps (which is the really long jacket). The actual shirt and stockings were considered like underwear and probably only had to be changed when they got dirty.
The cravat, which I mention a lot in The Scribbling Windhund, is basically the forerunner to the necktie only a lot fancier. I read on one of the fashion blogs that it was, like much men’s fashion, originally based on military clothing. Apparently, wearing thick fabric around your neck protected you from spears, bayonets, and daggers. Maybe it was psychological.
For those philosophy buffs watching at home, that last image is of Voltaire. He came up a lot when I googled Fashion and 1700s.
My favorite images, by far, are the Prussian army. Keep in mind, these fellas were one of the fiercest fighting forces in history. Lead by the junkers (the nobles who were trained from birth to lead the army) and comprised of mostly peasants who could expect to become middle-class if they survived the battles and the discipline of army life, one of Fredrich the Greats ministers quipped that, “Prussia was not a country with an army, but an army with a country.”
Infantryman’s uniform
Fredrich’s own uniform
Storming of the breach by Prussian troops during the Battle of Leuthen, 1757, Carl Röchling
The final bit of research I suffered through was basically to find out what these fuckers wore at home when they were relaxing. I’m so glad I did, because I was rewarded with these sexy, sexy gems:
Ward Nicholas Boylston by John Singleton Copley, 1767
Sir Issac Newton painted by James Thornhill, 1709–12
Apparently, formal dress was too restrictive for intellectuals and it was very common for studious men (like Sir Issac Newton on the left) to have their paintings done in their libraries wearing banyans.
Here’s the kicker for me. He’s still wearing breeches, stockings, a waist-coat and cravat. Basically, when you went home to relax you took off one jacket and replaced it with another, less tight, jacket.
Oh, and you also took off your wig.
My take away from all research is a loud and joyful, “Thank God for jeans and sneakers!” Though, if I were asked to be more profound:
Sassy never goes out of style.
The Fantasist is a quarterly online magazine that publishes three original Fantasy novellas on the third Thursday of every third month.
Once again, I got so interested in Steampunk that I forgot to announce my new release! It’s another anthology story called “Tortured Heart” and it will appear in Denying the Alpha.
Which looks something like this:
I love these anthologies because they always get me to write something new and interesting. I keep returning to the same world of shifters so this is similar to “The Scarf” and Hiring the Tiger. “Tortured Heart” tells the story about a crow shifter who has fought hard to rise to steward of his witch’s household only to fall in love with a rival witch’s wolf.
So, I said before the Victorians had some interesting ideas about what the future would bring. Here’s some of the ones that really missed the mark:
So not only were we supposed to have hover-boards by 2000, we were supposed to be walking on water with the aid of balloons, weird shoes, and… a unicycle.
Seconds before a futuristic collision. Still less wait time than the Path.
Here’s another flying machine. That apparently hovers while the exceptionally well-dressed rural person greets his mailman.
I love this image, because conquering the depths is not complete until we can gamble underwater.
I love this image because … I have no idea what they are doing.
The Fantasist is a quarterly online magazine that publishes three original Fantasy novellas on the third Thursday of every third month.
So, you’ve got the background blue-prints to your Steampunk world, now how do you put that to use while building a story with characters and plot?
If you’re an outliner, you may be struggling with the amount of details you have to find a place for. If you’re a discovery writer, you may have already written the story and be trimming down on the info dumps and useless bits of the world.
One of the weirdest things about The Scribbling Windhund is the point of view. Since the story is told by the machine, it exists somewhere between an epistolary work, a play, and the diary of a fashion critic. So, I had an interesting task in building the world without the use of large descriptive paragraphs (except when Otto gets effusive in his drafts).
Here’s my advice:
Determine what information about the world is most necessary to develop the plot and characters…
As the creator of the world, I know that Prussians have a list of names approved by the state that parents must use. I know that households are given financial incentives not only to have children but to have children who win awards and honors. I know that there’s a garden inside Prussia where every flower is artificially created to be perfectly symmetrical.
But none of that made it into the story. It filtered my experience of the world and informed how I wrote Otto, especially, but I couldn’t find a place to fit it while I was writing. So, I didn’t try to force it into the story. I remember I had to cut a section I particularly liked where Karl was looking down at the city and could see the garden and Otto told him about the perfect shape of the flowers. There’s was about five pages and it was acting as a fun metaphor for the culling of living things (like people) in the name of perfection, but really it wasn’t adding to the plot or the characters so I took it out.
And when to reveal it:
If you try to tell everything about the world on the first page, there will be no room for them to get attached to the character or story and in the end. I might feel like a textbook about the world. So, figure out when a technology or law gets revealed organically (then make sure it’s consistently applied even before the reader knows about it).
For example, Otto doesn’t mention the constant surveillance of the military, or the banning of imported alcohol, or the monitoring of sexual behaviors until later in the story. But he always behaves as someone who lives in that world and is particularly careful about what he says to and about the military.
Hide information dumps by building character and tension around them
I feel like this is a dirty trick, but it’s so useful. Whenever I have to get information about the world to the reader, I try to imagine how I would have learned about it explicitly in the world. I’m not afraid of character’s thinking back to school lessons, mother’s lectures, or the like.
I got to really cheat once or twice in this story, because the main character writes for a newspaper and takes the opportunity to educate children about something that happened in the past. Since the story is set up the way it is, I was able to include the actual newspaper story and the character’s interpretation of the event. Karl does his share of educating as well, but it comes paired with either an actual disagreement he’s having with Otto or with a personal disagreement with himself. So there’s always two or three things happening while the reader is learning about the world.
The Fantasist is a quarterly online magazine that publishes three original Fantasy novellas on the third Thursday of every third month.
Which is cool. And because that’s cool, I wanted to make sure it was a good post so I’m writing about something I’m really pretty passionate about – building a good world. And I’m going to make it about Steampunk, because having your 100 post is not a good reason to break-up a theme.
There are a couple ways to start building a world. Maybe you have a premise for the whole world. Maybe you have a specific character problem that relies on a certain cultural restraint. Maybe you have a contest offering money for a Steampunk novella and you need to craft a non-Victorian Steampunk.
Either way, you need to grow that kernel of an idea into an entire populated world. I can’t tell which saddens me more, would-be writers with incredibly detailed worlds and no characters or plots to live there or would-be writers with a world just like ours except for one weird quirk that only seems to exist to inconvenience the really well-crafted protagonist.
Starting with a concept and filling in the story.
For me, this is the easier of the two starts. I can always find a character to play in a world. But here’s some questions to ask to flesh out a world and find the forces your characters are going to be fighting against.
Who takes out the trash? Enforces the laws? Takes care of the children?
What are the society’s ideals? Tell the story of a person in conflict with them.
Who does this society “other”?
Consider basic story types. I think Seven Plots is limiting yourself and I, of course, would add Romance to the list, but there are worse places to start than the seven basic plots. How can one of those plots work well into your world.
I’ll answer these questions for The Scribbling Windhund. I wanted a Steampunk version of Fredrick the Great’s Prussia. So, I started by researching about this time period in German history and by researching the man himself. My man, Fritz, was a benevolent dictator, almost certainly gay, and obsessed with the ideals of the Enlightenment, service to state before self, and a military genius. His legacy has been a bit muddied in America (Hitler compared himself to Frederick the Great), but I wondered what his ideal society would look like with more modern technology.
So, the concept for my Prussia became a society of people who prized the work of artists, craftsmen, and thinkers, who idolized their military, and who strongly believed in service to the state above self.
People who prized these ideals so much, that they build a city on top of their old city dedicated to their ideals.
I knew this world would be a very pretty place, with gardens and art on every building. There would be intellectual salons, state-sponsored concerts. Basically, a society built around high-brow arts. The restaurants would all run by people who were passionate about food. Every architect would be a visionary. Everyone who wanted to grow up and be an artist, or a writer, or a singer would have an outlet (that wasn’t the internet).
So, who enforces the laws?
Obviously, a strong military. Who takes out the trash and takes care of the kids was harder. Since artistic and intellectual types are incapable of tending to demeaning labor like doing their own laundry and changing diapers, someone else had to do it. But if all education was designed to create artists and philosophers… maybe the military would have to force them to do it.
This took me down a weird 1984 path. Where I started to ask what would happen to the non-artistic and I realized their only place in society would be the military protecting the artists, or in the service industry taking care of the artists. I decided to combine them, so that this sectors military is enormous—over half of the population. The people who take out the trash are soldiers. The ones who repair the roads? Soldiers. The lady behind the counter at the DMV? A soldier. The person doing your taxes. Actually, I’ve met accountants that are very passionate about money, that’s probably an artist’s specialization.
Growing the military to this size made for an interesting twist on this Artist’s Utopia. Would I live in a place that paid me to write, if I was constantly monitored by the military? I don’t think I would.
Which brings me to…
Who is not in line with the society’s ideals?
Since Prussia is a society build around service to the state, idolization of the principles of Enlightenment and arts, someone who doesn’t trust the military-state would be on the outs. Also someone one who either wasn’t an artist, or for some reason had been excluded from the society.
This character became Karl, my terrorist. The champion of the poor, the ugly, the uneducated, and those left behind and erased from history when this perfect society was created. While being a master craftsman himself, Karl knew too many people who did not possess these talents who had been overlooked when the society built itself.
Who is othered?
I cheated on this one, because I decided to make Prussia a conservative country as well and reflect some problematic beliefs about what the ideal family looked like. This led to second-class citizens, people who had mental, physical, or emotional limitations and needed special protection from the government. Religious zealotry (i.e. any worship) and homosexuality fell into this category.
I liked the idea of making second-class citizens, people who weren’t ostracized so much as limited. They needed to be protected from the harm they do to themselves and can’t be put in positions where their limitation might affect their judgement. It gets creepy.
But this idea brought me to my second character, the everyday average man in this society. Otto, a good Prussian boy, who believes in his sector’s military, his own sexual limitations, and the superiority of this system… until he meets the terrorist.
Starting with a character and filling in the story.
It’s a littler harder to build a world around a character with a cultural restraint/element. The trouble really comes from having a great idea that relies on one aspect of the character being persecuted. It can make the world seem unfairly biased against the character and ultimately unrealistic.
Here’s the questions to ask about the cultural restraint/element.
Could this kind of cultural restraint/element exist in the real world? How is it treated and what are you saying by placing it in this context?
How do true-believers in this restraint/element view it? If the justification sounds evil or unlikely, then chances are you need to think more about this element.
What other aspects of the society would be affected by the restraint/element? For example, if your element is that your character has a steam-powered airship, what else is the society doing with that technology?
Who is in charge of this restraint/element (who created it)?
I could cheat again and talk about Otto’s homosexuality and how Prussia monitors and restricts him because of it, how I based it off of conservative communities in real life and the logical conclusion of enforcing anti-sodomy laws, and how the authorities in Prussia view homosexuality as dangerous to the individual…
But, I’m going to focus on the actually technology instead.
There are two big technological element I created for this story. The Environmental Dome and the DikTak. Both of them are vital to the story, but the dome exists in a vacuum I had to explain away.
So the character premise was: a terrorist escapes a prison by sneaking parts off an unobtrusive clock-work machine and using it to remove the environmental dome that’s been keeping all his friend imprisoned underneath the current city.
I’ll start with the DikTak. This is a simple clockwork automaton that functions as a note-taking machine because it can record what it ‘hears’ and ‘sees.’ Since I wanted the DikTak as the narrator of the story, it needed to be able to ‘see’ which is fairly advanced (it only sort of exists in real life). However, it had to be unremarkable enough to be allowed into a prison, which meant Prussia had to have not only clock-work devises by extraordinarily complex ones or else they would need to remark on how weird the DikTak was.
I could have left the DikTak as the solitary technological advancement (since its an invention of local genius, Karl Schneider), but I thought it would feel more organic in a world filled with other advancements. So, Otto mentions it casually like an advanced watch or toy. The characters don’t react to the machine like it’s extraordinary. There’s other technology like it. We see a clock-work telegraph machine in action and Otto draws attention to another piece of clockwork that is even more advanced. The clockwork in the prison-tower.
So that’s how the technology effects of the aspects of the world. If I got out of the DikTak’s narration, I would show other elements of Prussian life, which probably include clockwork sidewalks and staircases. It was created fairly recently since Karl’s designed are still used by clock-work re-creationists, but it’s entered enough into daily use for a little mechanical dog to not be notably out of place.
The second big piece of tech I had was the environment domes. So far this doesn’t exist in the real world, though as a metaphor for a strict border I was saying some pretty interesting things by keeping it impermeable and having the government forcing people to remain trapped inside it.
This had to be a complicated and not easily understood technology (it takes my genius a decade to break it). If it was a simple technology that was widely understood, then the people in the Undercity would be able to fabricate their own and certain plot elements would fall apart.
So it sounds pretty evil, which meant I had to take some time to ensure that the readers saw why it was necessary. Life without the dome is impossible because the environment is unlivable outside of them. Yup, I might be saying something with those domes…
Because the domes are complex, they are not widely used in society. There’s no thunderstorm rooms, or snow-filled parks—at least not in Prussia.
And of course, in Prussia the military controls the dome. Until, of course, they don’t…
The Fantasist is a quarterly online magazine that publishes three original Fantasy novellas on the third Thursday of every third month.
I love it when Science Fiction manages to predict the future. The seashells in your ears from Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Assimov’s Robotic laws forming the basis to real life robot training. Religious Zealots taking over the country like in The Handmaidens Tale…okay I don’t like that one so much.
Anyways, the Victorians had some interesting ideas about what the future would bring that make it easier to add flavor to a Steampunk world. Here’s some of the ones that came true
I know it’s not technically a roomba, but it does the same thing. It’s very telling that even with a machine to do the work, the Victorians still assumed we’d have household servants.
In my filthy, little mind, this is a sex hotline. She’s about to show some ankle and the operator is just like, “oh, not this foot fantasy again…”
I want benches on the moving sidewalks in airports. I mean, I also want a suave mustache and a fancy half-cape, but this is such an improvement on the modern design!
Their are few things more modern than going out for drinks with a friend and then ignoring that friend to look at pictures of babies and male models. I also love that the woman is red is smoking a blunt and there’s some kind of weird space car in the background. The predicted cars and legalization, folks!
The only thing unrealistic about a machine that combines stationary bicycling and virtual reality goggles is that the owner is actually using it for exercise and not as a clothes rack.
The Fantasist is a quarterly online magazine that publishes three original Fantasy novellas on the third Thursday of every third month.
These three images directly inspired some aspects of my world.
The first two are moving houses. The black and white one is actually the cover of an early speculative fiction novel. The other is a post card of an entire town being moved someplace. I’m not sure if its meant to be unloaded or just in constant motion, but the idea of taking a city apart building by building and moving it elsewhere, probably without the unwanted parts of the city, really got my gears turning.
This bad boy has been on my computer since the early days of the internet.
One of the hallmarks of my sectoral universe is the environmental domes. They feature briefly in Evasive Love and are central to The Scribbling Windhund. Partly it comes from my fear of natural disaster and my non-scientific mind trying to imagine how actual scientists will save us from the coming environmental apocalypse. The idea of a city encased in a glass box (complete with artificial sunlight!) has long intrigued me.
The Fantasist is a quarterly online magazine that publishes three original Fantasy novellas on the third Thursday of every third month.
Graceful Indecency 