Sometime about 2005 I found Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn at a book fair where I was teaching. It appealed to me, enough to think about writing something similar. It was classified as steampunk, a term I had not yet encountered.

I started looking around to find out what this steampunk was, and found the answer confusing. There were dirigibles everywhere in steampunk-world, but you were more likely to run into Jack the Ripper than airmen at work. The fantasy/horror end of the steampunk continuum was not to my liking.

I had plenty of straight fantasy and straight science fiction on my plate, so steampunk dropped down to the bottom of my consciousness where it would remain until the stars alligned, astronomically or astrologically.

That happened in 2017. Cyan had recently been published and I was a speaker at Westercon 70 in Tempe, Arizona. I decided to look in on every panel that had anything to do with steampunk. I wasn’t about to miss my chance to learn from the authors who were actually writing in the sub-genre.

I didn’t find many definiitons; in fact, there didn’t seem to be any boundaries. It seems that steampunk is a culture, or an aesthetic. (As opposed to an anesthetic, which a lot of accepted literature is.) Or maybe it was just a bunch of people having a fun return to the literature of their childhoods. For some, that meant Jules Verne; for others, Frankenstein.

It seemed to be a revisiting of the wonders and  horrors of science, when science was in its infancy. Most of the writers seemed to bunch up at the ends of the continuum — either Verniers or Steiners. I clearly belonged to the Vernier camp.

(Yes, I know Verniers or Steiners is a bad joke, but steampunk is a frequently lighthearted thing, and I’m in a mood today. Get over it.)

I visited a bunch of steampunk related panels, but all I found out about boundaries was that there aren’t any. I liked a lot of what I heard, but I couldn’t find my own place in steampunk. Then I visited a panel called The Science of Steampunk: What Makes the Gears Go Round?

The panel was divided between Verniers and Steiners, all of whom were steampunk authors. The Steiners had less to say, and looked a little bored. I concluded that they really didn’t care much what made the gears go round, as long as they had fun spinning them. The Verniers were looking for “real world” connections.

A series of speculative questions was put to the panel, including, “What real world changes could have kept steam power dominant further into the future?” No one had any great ideas. I suggested from the audience that a country with much coal and no oil would continue using steam for economic reasons.

That’s a probable scenario, but not brillant deduction. Then a bomb went off in my head.

What if that country were Britain?

What if WWI had happend early?

What if British efforts in that war had included an organization of spies, saboteurs, and assassins?

What if that group had assassinated Nikolaus Otto, Gottleib Daimler, and Rudolf Diesel, delaying the adoption of an internal combustion engine, and what if they had continuously sabotaged Zepplin’s work, while stealing his ideas?

What if Britain had another secret weapon, a real-world invention that has been forgotten by the real world?

Now I don’t mean to tell you that all of that came into my consciousness in a heartbeat, but the embryo of it did. I knew the real world situation circa 1860 — 1910 from studying history, including knowledge of the four critical German scientists and inventors.

I also knew about their secret weapon, and it is extremely obscure.

Also silly.

Also an example of a well intentioned law that made a situation worse.

However, that secret weapon could lead to a world where Britain, not Germany, had dirigibles, ruled the world, and was hated by everybody.

It was time to start writing, but I still had a question. Was this novel going to really be  steampunk?

We can talk about that next time, while I am telling you about the secret weapon.

more next week