Am I wasting my time writing steampunk stories that don’t have magic in them? This is a serious question. Leave your opinion in the comments.
I got the urge to write steampunk after the owner of a mystery book store got me reading Gail Carriger. I would not normally read a book with Vampires in it. If the book had Vampires and Werewolves, would not read the back blurb, unless it was a humors book.
The book was good and the magic in the book had structure. There was still a lot of hand waving, but the magic was not the Deux Ex Machina of the story solution.
She has steam rolled the genre so that if feels like a steampunk book must be filled with magic. Only people from a line of magic parents can do magic.
Consider, if a person could snap their fingers and produce a gold coin. Then by our physics, an old atom bomb that destroyed a city, only converted one gram of matter into energy. A nickle (a five cent piece) weights five grams. If that magically created coin weighted as much as a nickle then that person has the power to destroy the biggest city there is today. There is the nuclear hand grenade problem of throwing the magic far enough away that it does not destroy the magic user.
Back to me. Writing stories without magic doesn’t mean that my stories don’t violet the laws of physics. I mangle those law all over the place, or it wouldn’t be Steampunk. But my characters are not born special. Cue the song “You’re the one”.
Thomas Edison’s father was exiled out of Canada for political activism. He was also a shop keeper and then a shingle makers.
Tesla’s father was a priest and a poet.
Alexander Graham Bell’s father was a speech therapists.
These kings of technology did not come from a long line of inventors. Get real with your characters. They may be gifted, even have a golden spoon in their mouth, but they weren’t magically endowed. They worked to build their inventions. And it wasn’t easy. Edison set fire to a rail road car (when he was a kid).
Tesla worked differential equations without a computer or even a slide rule.
Mathematics were their magic language. Anyone can use mathematics. It’s hard, so most people don’t brother learning or using math. We should treat people that do math like wizards.
Unabashed plug. Read my book, and tell me how to make the book a better one. Where have you seen an offer like that before?
I apologize for not posting last week. I am the president of a small club. Before going to Wild Wild West Con 9 I talked with l the board members of the club and described my plans for what to do if the county was impacted by COVID-19.
I laid out that if the schools were closed or if there were case of community spread of the virus I would cancel the next meeting.
The club was founded in 1936 and no one can remember a meeting being canceled.
Wednesday before the Friday night meeting the president of the United States moved to block flights into the United States. One of the club board members called me and wanted to cancel the meeting.
I called and talked to the other board members and majority of them wanted to go ahead with the meeting. There was only one case of the virus in the county, and it’s a big county. I agreed with the majority.
The next morning I was reading the news and found that the Governor of California had requested that all major meeting of 250 people or more be canceled. He further requested that meeting of less than 250 people have a social space of six feet.
I canceled the meeting the day before it was going to happen. It may have been a request, but I figure that the Governor knows people that know a lot more than I do. I wanted to hold the meeting. I wish that the new of his request had been better published. It was way down in the news articles. I found the news in a business magazine.
Some of the club member are over 60 and some have health problems.
Someone said that; we do what we have to do for the better of the whole.
Stay strong, write on. Stay safe, protect yourself, and take this seriously.
Professor Hyram Voltage