Ons 28/10: Gail Z Martin

I dag har vi en gästskribent på hemsidan, författaren Gail Z Martin, som skriver om att skriva steampunk med Pittsburgh och amerikanskt 1800-tal som utgångspunkt.

Lots of steampunk stories take place in England. I guess it’s only natural, since steampunk has a very Victorian sensibility to it. And I love a good story set in London as much as the next person. But I think we sometimes seem to forget that people all over the world were doing interesting things during the 1800s that had nothing to do with Queen Victoria. Setting steampunk elsewhere is not only equally legitimate, but a welcome change of pace.

Iron & Blood, the first of the Jake Desmet Adventures steampunk series that I co-write with my husband, Larry N. Martin, is set in an alternative history Pittsburgh in 1898. In the U.S., we tend to consider the 1800s to be the ‘Civil War period’ or the ‘Cowboy period’, and both of those things are true—but there was also a lot more going on. Pittsburgh was the epicenter of American manufacturing at that time, with larger-than-life entrepreneurs and inventors like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and George Westinghouse. Pittsburgh was also the second-biggest financial center, just behind New York City, and it was an enormously wealthy city with fortunes earned in steel, coal, steam and railroads.

Pittsburgh, however, is not New York. It’s always considered itself to be a ‘frontier’ city, even though the frontier long-ago moved farther west. So Pittsburgh followed the Victorian conventions in its own way, without quite as much pretense. Wealthy Pittsburghers might take their fashion cues from New York, which was taking its cues from London, but those fashions and sensibilities would be handled in a thoroughly Pittsburgh way.

Channeling a Victorian world view through a Pittsburgh sensibility was one of the fun aspects of writing Iron & Blood. Pittsburgh was at the height of its manufacturing glory in 1898. Its rivers were lined with massive steel mills so large and sprawling that they didn’t seem human scale. The sky was dark with coal smoke at mid-day, and the burn-off flares sent pillars of fire into the man-made night. Immigrants from all across Europe came to the city, settling into enclaves separated by language, religion and nationality, yet intermingling into something new. And while the real Pittsburgh might not have had supernatural monsters, it did have an oligarchy of newly wealthy industrialists willing to utilize Pinkerton brawn and plenty of bullets to enforce a testy peace with aggrieved workers.

We changed up some of Pittsburgh’s past in Iron & Blood, adding a catastrophic fire and earthquake that never happened in real life, and creating the Oligarchy, a shadow government that arose after the imposition of martial law after the cataclysmic events occurred. We also drew on the rich folklore and traditions of Pittsburgh’s Polish, Russian, Scottish, German, Slavic, Hungarian and Jewish immigrants to incorporate a dangerous undercurrent of dark magic and supernatural threat. There’s a tension between science and magic that runs throughout Iron & Blood, as old and new wrestle for dominance.

The real Pittsburgh is a city that still retains much of its Victorian architecture, and in Iron & Blood we see the heyday of the Gilded Age, along with fantastic steam-driven inventions that benefit from Nikola Tesla’s genius. In New Pittsburgh, George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla teamed up to create the Tesla-Westinghouse Corporation, a powerhouse of innovation that not only supplied industrialists with advanced technology, but ran a skunkworks of off-the-books projects to provision secret government agencies like the Department of Supernatural Investigation.
Iron & Blood incorporates a lot of elements we associate with urban fantasy—absinthe witches and dark magic, supernatural creatures, cursed objects, ghosts and monsters—except in the setting of a Victorian-era, steam-driven city. So there are airships and automatons, clockwork zombies and Gatling-gun drones, Tesla death rays and mechanical carrier pigeons. There’s an element of the Wild West as well, because Pittsburgh was once an outpost on the frontier at its founding, and it’s never lost that frontiersman in-your-face attitude, or the conviction that a Colt Peacemaker won’t get the last word in an argument.

So if you’re looking for steampunk that breaks some rules, strains at its corset stays and challenges convention, have a look at Iron & Blood for a thoroughly American take on the steam dreams of the Victorian era.

My Days of the Dead blog tour runs through October 31 with never-before-seen cover art, brand new excerpts from upcoming books and recent short stories, interviews, guest blog posts, giveaways and more! Plus, I’ll be including extra excerpt links for my stories and for books by author friends of mine. You’ve got to visit the participating sites to get the goodies, just like Trick or Treat!

Details here:  http://www.ascendantkingdoms.com/2015/10/22/days-of-the-dead-blog-tour-tricks-treats-and-scary-good-stuff/

Book swag is the new Trick-or-Treat! Grab your envelope of book swag awesomeness from me & 10 authors http://on.fb.me/1h4rIIe before 11/1!

Trick or Treat! Excerpt from my new urban fantasy novel Vendetta set in my Deadly Curiosities world here http://bit.ly/1ZXCPVS Launches Dec. 29

More Treats! Enter to win a copy of Deadly Curiosities! https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/160181-deadly-curiosities

Treats! Enter to win a copy of Iron & Blood! https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/160182-iron-blood

Steampunk Treats! Enjoy an excerpt from Iron & Blood here http://bit.ly/1GAvGOc

Bonus Treats! 2 FREE complete haunted novellas on Wattpad—my Deadly Curiosities tale The Final Death http://w.tt/1jsKqLL & our Steampunk story Grave Voices http://w.tt/1kapSrn set in the world of Iron & Blood Halloween Loot!

An excerpt from Jennifer Estep http://www.jenniferestep.com/short-stories/short-stories/

Gail Z Martin