Defend Yourself, Weakling!

Welcome to this Borrowed Hog? That’s not what I was expecting at all.

Sorry. Sometimes I like to eat my words with a spoonerism.

I wrote a steampunk novel! It’s called The Falling Machine, and the book is the first in a trilogy about steampunk superheroes in 1880’s New York. The entire series is called The Society of Steam, and the main character is a young woman named Sarah Stanton. She’s dreamed of becoming a superhero ever since she was a child, and suddenly finds herself forced into a terrifying adventure when her mentor is killed in front of her on the top of the (unfinished) Brooklyn Bridge.

Helping her to uncover the mystery is a mechanical man called the Automaton.

Let us begin by noting that you are writing in the steampunk genre.

Guilty as charged. In my defense, when I started putting together the first volume in 2007 I had no idea the genre would grow so big so quickly.

My three word definition for Steampunk is Victorian era fantasy. That is, of course, a wildly inaccurate definition, but it comes in useful when I’m talking to normally dressed people while wearing a Top hat and goggles.

I’d say as a genre it’s inferior to fantasy in the sense that steampunk stories often take place in a world far more similar to our own than the average fantasy story does. That means that, as a writer, when you’re faced with a sticky plot point you can’t just magic up whatever solution you need, or have a dragon (or an army–or a dragon army) show to get your hero out of trouble. (Insert smiley here.)

Instead we just invent magical gatling guns, and the go read an article on Wikipedia.
Here in our mighty world, we are often tasked with creating whole new worlds.  While in steampunk, you are often asked to twist the existing world to your own ends.  In this, you become something of a puppet of meat, slicing the faces of your victims off and wearing them over your own hideous guise in a ghastly mockery of society.  Tell us, what kind of face does your book wear?

The Automaton, my mechanical man who plays quite a large role in the book, wears a porcelain face with human features painted onto it, so there’s a literal answer for you.

But, metaphorically speaking, the Falling Machine is in an alternate reality story. But unlike a lot of other Steampunk books with timelines split off from our own, I wanted to create another world the way that Marvel comics do. Their future will, barring any apocalyptic actions by super-villains, one day be the same as our future. They will have a president Obama, iPhones, and all the rest. But unlike comics, my characters age and die normally.

As for being a “mockery of society”, I’ve already had a reader accuse me of being too kind to the upper class characters in the book. All I can say is that I hope she reads book two, because all is not as it appears to be…

Well, I’ve been lucky enough to have been on a panel with Cherie and Gail, and they are intelligent, lovely, wickedly-talented women who are indeed very validating.

But this isn’t my first time trying to become an author. A while back I came pretty close to becoming a writer, and instead I decided that I’d go make videogames, so I’ve been doing that since the 90s. As a game designer and producer I’ve worked on games with characters from Batman to Reader Rabbit. But in the end my focus has always been on thinking about my audience and giving them an experience that’s worth their time and money. And that’s one of the things I’ve been focusing on with this book.

I’m trying to have interesting, thoughtful characters with genuine emotions, but at the same time I have some huge pieces of action that they get involved with. I never want to have a scene where there isn’t an emotional reason that the character is involved. And The Falling Machine is only the beginning, as the stakes get higher and higher in each book, both for the characters personally, and the world that they inhabit.

One of my favorite definitions of science fiction and fantasy goes like this:

Science Fiction is about personifying humanity’s relationship with technology, Fantasy is about personifying humanity’s relationship with its symbols.

Through fiction we explore those relationships with (and through) our characters. So even though I made a joke about Fantasy “having it easy” above, steampunk authors get to a similar cheat, because we can choose whatever elements of Fantasy and Science Fiction we want to use, and ignore the rest.

Because my story has superheroes in it, I’ve landed somewhere in the middle. Some characters definitely have superhuman powers, but they all are heavily concerned with the effects that new technologies have on their world.

But no matter where you land, I think the trick is to take all this fantastic stuff and crush it down into a level where it’s about human concerns and problems. I can have all the steampunk trappings, but in the end it’s a story about a young girl and a mechanical man, trying to make their way through the world.

(Also, can a shining light actually save anything?)
Your hubris will someday be your downfall.  Please tell us how you would like to die.

Quickly and painlessly. I would also prefer to have some dignity left when I go, but from what I’ve seen that’s highly unlikely.
What is your favorite animal?  Keep in mind that answering falsely will let us know that you are a scoundrel and a threat to reunification.

Having interacted with a number of them, I’m a pretty big fan of dogs. I like their loyalty, and the fact that they gave up their own evolutionary path to travel along the DNA highway with us hairless monkeys for the last twenty millennia or so.

I’ve tried to make The Falling Machine a book that expresses what makes me passionate about the genres of Steampunk and Superheroes. I’ve tried to create a world filled with characters with depth and emotion while still having mechanical men, harpoon firing villains, and a huge battles–and that’s just all in the first 10,000 words.

I think the best thing about genre fiction is the ability to blend the ridiculous with the sublime, and with this book I’ve tried to provide heaping helpings of both while telling what I hope is an emotional story about the consequences of power.

Thanks indeed! I appreciate the chance to reach out to your ever-growing army of Sykers. I can only hope that my book will entertain them half as much as yours have.

People who are interested can find me over at andrewpmayer.com and/or facebook.com/societyofsteam