This is the interview I gave by e-mail to the March 10 issue of the Gatehouse Gazette, a steampunk magazine, which also published a review.
Were you aware of steampunk before or during the writing of this novel?
I’m a little isolated from popular culture, living in Japan, but I had heard of steampunk! Sure – it’s a genre I actually enjoy quite a lot as movies (Wild Wild West and League of Gentlemen) and as a general concept (I enjoyed playing Crimson Skies on my computer, for example – I guess that counts as steampunk or dieselpunk). However, when I read some steampunk books, I find that they are too concerned with being steampunk to be totally enjoyable as stories. That’s true of a lot of genre books–I’m not into vampire stories, etc. Typically the writing is poor, and the characters are little more than cardboard cutouts moving against a superbly crafted background. Avatar springs to mind–a beautiful film, with decent acting, but on the whole, poor script and plot. Most genre fiction is like that, so it’s not a put down of steampunk per se.
How do you think your novel fits in with the general concept of “steampunk”?
As you say, it uses real-world technology for the most part. But the plot hinges on technology that isn’t found in today’s world, and it’s set in a fictional past, so in that sense it’s “heliumpunk” at the very least. There are some obvious messages in Beneath Gray Skies, but I do hope that they don’t hit you over the head too hard, and in that sense, I hope it’s more than a genre novel, be it steampunk, alternative history or whatever.
Why did you take Fort Sumter as the break from real history, rather than another event or point in time?
I wanted to keep fairly close to the real timeline, as I wanted a recognizable pseudo-history. The Southern states had threatened secession in the event of Lincoln’s election, and Fort Sumter was the tipping point. This was really the make or break test of Lincoln as a leader–would he give in to the noisy abolitionists, or would he give in to the demands of the South? He was damned if he did, damned if he didn’t, whatever his decision. My timeline shifted him out of the decision-making role, and pushed the responsibility onto a more cynical, if equally pragmatic and practical, politician, Henry Seward. I could have taken Dred Scott, or the Nebraska Compromise or something like that as the breakpoint, but Buchanan and his cabinet are not nearly so well-known as Lincoln, and most people seem to regard Sumter as the effective start of the Civil War. Anyway, that’s my amateur historian’s view.
You make reference to events between this break, but shift the action straight to the 1920s – were you not tempted to explore some of these events more fully?
It was tempting, yes, but I’m leaving them for prequels (smile). More seriously, I thought that too many diversions into the byways of my alternative timeline would distract the reader from the main plot. They’re there as foundations to the big story, but not as decorative flying buttresses. The whole business of the South attempting to take the Danish Virgin Islands would make an intriguing vignette in itself, but wouldn’t add a lot to the book I wrote. There’s a whole book that could be written on the Great European War (my timeline’s WWI) of course. And I am certainly looking at the first few years of the Bolshevik revolution (which gets several mentions) as a setting for my next alternative history novel, which will involve a twist in the history that we know.
The alternative world has the same technologies as the real world – was this deliberate, and, if you were to write the novel again, would you be tempted to introduce some new technology, as you intend to in your new novel?
I didn’t want to change the airship technology too much, as the real thing is marvellous and miraculous enough. My LZ127, the Bismarck, does differ from the real LZ127 (Graf Zeppelin) in a number of ways, though: first, the Bismarck was designed for helium, the LZ127 was, of course, hydrogen-filled. Next, the Blaugas neutral buoyancy fuel engines were actually available for that time, but I didn’t want to use them (Germany’s engineering might easily not have been up to the development). The radio equipment on the Zeppelins was actually inside the control gondolas, rather than separated, but I wanted the Bismarck’s radio outside the hull for dramatic effect (the engines were mounted in this way, of course). And, of course, Zeppelins didn’t carry parachutes. The Bismarck is more the size of the Hindenburg, or R100/R101 than the Graf Zeppelin, and I think it’s doubtful if something that size could have been constructed at that time.
There are a few other places where I diverge from our technology timeline: for example, the use of shoulder-fired rockets in the Confederacy, as the result of the lack of metallurgical techniques to produce artillery.
But there’s no point in my having the South developing, say, nuclear power. They wouldn’t have had the engineering skills to back up the science. Face it, though the Merrimack class was a potential war-winner for the South (it could have destroyed the Union’s blockade capability, deployed intelligently), they only had the resources to produce one of the class, and I didn’t seeing their economic condition improving too much over the next few years. Nor did I want to invent some sort of fantasy technology with no relation at all to our real world. It’s possible that the relative lack of oil in the Union would have slowed the development of the automotive industry a little — at least as far as internal combustion engines are concerned. Maybe they could have run on alcohol, or even used Stirling engines fired by something else. But things like steam-powered airships are absurd — you only have to do the mathematics to realise that. In any case, as I say, real-life airships are (were?) almost as amazing as anything we can dream up.
Do you think dialogue is more important than description in driving the plot?
Yes, definitely. The way people speak is as important as what they say. We do, after all, communicate with words, and I think dialog does help bring a sense of immediacy that reported speech can’t do as well as the manner of speech providing a clue to the character, and hence to the ploy. To write simply, “it was decided at a meeting that…” doesn’t give the same life as the dialogue that led up to that decision. Of course, you can overuse dialogue, but I do regard it as a plot driver as well as a character development tool. I’ve said it before, and I’ll continue to say it – Elmore Leonard and John le Carré are my favourite dialogue writers – they say so much about a character by making him or her say only a few words, and thereby drive the plot forward.
What was the inspiration for the contents of the box?
Without giving away the identity of the contents, I needed something with a touch of mystery, and with some real value. These contents actually do exist–they were in Berlin up to 1945–and turned up in Moscow in the 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR. It suddenly hit me that these existed in real life, and would make a good lightweight valuable cargo for the Bismarck. The back-story in the museum is fiction, of course.
Do you think focussing on small, relatively ‘unimportant people’ and their actions enables more possibilities as an author than telling the story through a grand narrative of events, or by using real characters as protagonists?
Well, Beneath Gray Skies was a bit of a novelty for me. Typically I write from a single point of view, either the omniscient eye in the sky, or first person. To dodge around in the way I did was a new thing in my writing. It’s not a unique device, of course, by any manner of means – John le Carré does it very effectively sometimes in the Smiley novels, and Len Deighton does it with his historical novels – but in Beneath Gray Skies there would have been no single character who could have seen all the ramifications of the plot, and there would have been too much offstage reported action with the God’s Eye view. As to the status of the characters, yes, I like the idea of using relatively minor characters to tell the story. They don’t have the big picture that the major players do and they, together with the reader, discover what’s going on around them. If you want a good example of this parallel discovery process (in a rather bad book) look at James Clavell’s Shogun where the protagonist learns Japanese by osmosis at the same time as the reader.
Your new novel which you are researching is also set in the 1920s – are you drawn to this period for any specific reason, and would you be tempted to set a story in another period. If so, which one?
Why do I like the 1920s? It was an interesting time — the old Europe had broken up and the social and political orders were changing very fast. New ideas, such as Fascism and Bolshevism, were coming on the scene. The beginnings of the European welfare system were coming to fruition. And it was an immensely fruitful age in the technological sense. Cars, planes, and of course airships, were being developed with some stunningly new ideas at an immense speed. Look at what we have now. The US Air Force is still flying C-130s and B-52s which are much older than the crews flying them! Fighter designs take fifteen years from drawing board to deployment. In the 20s, you could almost specify a fighter and have it delivered to the squadrons inside a year. That’s just aeronautics, of course. Other areas of technology were almost as fruitful. Look at the wonderful land speed record vehicles, for example. John Cobb’s Railton Special, or even the amazing White Triplex.
Other interesting times? The 1950s, for sure. The Cold War and the threat of the Bomb and the jukebox culture. A fascinating psychological era. And the mid-Imperial Roman Empire (say 100-200AD) could be interesting–I’d like to explore links with China and the East at that time–such links existed, but it would be fascinating to see what would be the world picture if the Romans had possessed technology that eliminated slavery. The whole economy of Europe and probably the world would have been different.
Will you return to this particulat alternative world for a sequel?
Quite probably – but it may be a prequel rather than a sequel. I like “Bloody Brian” as a character, and he may re-appear. Likewise David Slater, but he will come in a sequel. A mid-20th century not dominated by the USA is always worth exploring.
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