Posts Tagged ‘steampunk’

movies

Steampunk at the Movies

When I first had the idea for the book that became Rebel Mechanics, I started preparing to write it by reading every steampunk book I could find, just to see what the genre was like and what had been done with it. I determined that there were three primary approaches to a steampunk world.

One was alternate history — it was our world and our Victorian era, but technological development, and sometimes other factors, had gone a different way so that the steampunky elements and retrofuturistic technology existed.

The other was secondary world — it’s a fantasy world (like Narnia, Middle Earth, Westeros, etc.) that looks a bit like our Victorian era, but with stempunky twists.

The third was post-apocalyptic — in the future, society has been destroyed and has rebuilt to approximately a Victorian level of technology/culture, with twists that make it steampunky rather than the way our Victorian era was.

I obviously went with alternate history, but one of the steampunk series I liked the best took the post-apocalyptic approach — the Hungry Cities series by Philip Reeve, starting with the book Mortal Engines.

I was pleased and hopeful when I heard that they were making a movie out of that first book because if it did well, it might open the door to movie interest for the Rebel Mechanics books. Alas, the movie was rather a bomb, in spite of having Peter Jackson (of the Lord of the Rings movies) involved. I didn’t get around to seeing it at the theater, but out of curiosity I checked the DVD out of the library.

And ouch. It’s been about ten years since I read the books, so I don’t remember a lot of plot details, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t basically Star Wars. Some of the imagery was wonderful, bringing to life this weird world where the cities are mobile, on giant tank-like treads, scouring the earth for resources, and with some of the larger cities preying on smaller, less powerful cities. But so much of it also looked like a cheap Disney Channel production, especially when any characters were talking. And yet it didn’t seem like the movie was aimed at teens because the characters were significantly aged up (they’re 17 in the book, but one of the actors was pushing 30 when it was made, and the characters seemed to be treated like they were 20-something). I felt like the movie skipped on explaining anything that was going on, and like I said, the end sequence was basically the battle against the Death Star from Star Wars (or possibly the similar sequence from The Force Awakens).

The worse thing was, it was rather boring. Midway through the movie, I ended up looking up the entire cast and their histories on IMDB, and then got sidetracked in random web surfing. That’s a bad sign.

I had thought while reading the books that there was no way this would be filmable. It turns out that the stuff I thought would be impossible to film worked out rather well. But somehow they managed to miss the point of the books while writing the script and turned interesting characters into generic tropes. Great visuals can’t compensate for that.

So, if you love steampunk and were looking for a good steampunk movie, this isn’t it, and I’m afraid this movie might have killed steampunk on film, for a while, at least.

My Books

Diving into Rebellion

While I’m getting nostalgic about what got me started writing various books, I realized that I started working on Rebel Mechanics around this time eight years ago.

Rebel Mechanics cover

I’d been working on the book that became A Fairy Tale, and I was unhappy with it. I had a vision for it and couldn’t quite make that vision work. Meanwhile, I had this other idea that I thought might be more marketable — a steampunk adventure story. I’d been making myself not work on the Shiny New Idea, but thought that maybe what I needed was a break to help me figure out what I needed to do with A Fairy Tale.

That summer, I was also dealing with some medical stuff. I had a frozen shoulder, which involves tissue encapsulating the joint so that you can’t move it. It’s tricky because it starts with pain in the shoulder, and the natural impulse is to rest that shoulder so it can heal, but resting is what allows it to freeze. I’d reached a point where I could barely lift my left arm when I finally admitted I needed help, and the prescription was physical therapy. It was tough physical therapy that involved not only exercises but also the therapist stretching and manipulating that arm to loosen the tissue. And there was a lot of pain. It’s hard to be really creative when you’re tired and in that much pain, and since I knew I’d have to do a lot of research to write that steampunk book, I decided to devote the time to doing research.

So, that was my summer of heavy-duty reading. I read more than fifty books to research Rebel Mechanics. I read non-fiction books about New York’s history during the Gilded Age, American history, other revolutions, steam power, trains, airships, houses in that era, clothing in that era. I read memoirs of people who lived in that era and biographies of key figures. I also read a lot of related fiction — other steampunk books, science fiction written during that era (H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson), novels written during that era or about that era by people who lived in that era. I re-read Jane Eyre (since I was doing the governess thing), read The Scarlet Pimpernel (since that related to Henry’s story), read a lot of Edith Wharton (about Gilded Age society).

All the while, I was piling up notes and ideas that I shaped into characters and a plot. It was a summer of wallowing in Victoriana, and I now remember it fondly, in spite of the pain.

I did eventually get full use of that shoulder back and regained my strength in that arm. I’m not quite as flexible as I was before, but I’m trying to work on that.

It also took me a few years to sell the book. I originally planned for it to be an adult fantasy novel, but the adult publishers weren’t interested, mostly because a lot of them saw it as a romance and even suggested it be sent to the romance houses (never mind that the romance was quite chaste), or else they said they’d already bought a steampunk book. I tried reading some romances that might be along the same lines (multiple books telling the story of the same couple), but I started thinking it would work better as young adult since my characters were so young, so I read a bunch of YA before deciding to rewrite it as YA. That took me another six months or so, and then it took nearly a year to sell. It was five years from the time I started researching it before it was actually published.