Cherie Priest: Dreadnought

Now Dreadnought is a sequel to Boneshaker and I don’t want to spoil how exactly. Where did the book start for you? Because opening on a nurse in a Civil war hospital in Virginia is a long way from the Seattle that Boneshaker took place in.

The answer to that is actually a little bit complicated. Not really because of the narrative at all, but because of contract issues. To try to make a long story short, Boneshaker was the last book I was contracted for through MacMillan and I was acutely aware that if Boneshaker didn’t do well, then I was I probably done with MacMillan. When we had a draft of it and started sending it around, the feedback started to be really really good. Before the book came out we had Warren Ellis and Mike Mignola and a bunch of pretty heavy hitters endorse it. A few months before Boneshaker came out, Tor said we would like to talk about one more book, mostly because the feedback was so good. So I was like, yeah, one more book. And other hand, oh, only one more book. If Boneshaker doesn’t take off, what I’m looking at is an aborted series. So I decided instead of telling a direct sequel, I was going to tell another story set in the same universe, but loosely connected to it so at least it would be two independent stories and not an aborted series that never managed to find its end.

On Boneshaker, the number one piece of feedback disguised as complaint, or vice versa, was that people wanted to see more of the world outside the wall. What does the rest of the world look like? So I thought, well, I’ll show the entire rest of the country and what better way to go from the East Coast to the West Coast. It’s not a travelogue. There’s a lot going on in it. But you do get to go through the border states and see the unincorporated West. There’s some intrigue and spying and steampunk Texas rangers and undead Mexican separatists.

When Boneshaker came out, you started a website and published an essay about “The clockwork century.” Had you plotted out in some detail this world the books take place in, even if it wasn’t seen?

Yes and no. That was kind of the fun of it. I actually wrote Tanglefoot after Boneshaker had been written, it was just published first. That’s the novelette that went through Subterranean. It started with this vague idea to write a steampunk novel colliding with the fact that I had lived in Seattle for a couple years and I wanted to write a Seattle novel. There’s a big steampunk scene here. I think largely because there’s a big aging goth scene here, not to put too fine a point on it. (laughs) I count myself in that number. I’m not criticizing anybody.

I wanted there to be a really good reason for all of the advanced tech. I wanted to have this universe where the technology is symptomatic of the setting and it’s not gears glued on hats. So reverse-engineering from that, what drives technology more than war? And in the nineteenth century, we had this giant war. If you poke around online or in the right patent archives you can find all this stuff from around 1864 and 1865 where inventors were proposing these crazy-ass war machines. This awesome steampunk Victorian tech that they were basically trying to bribe the Union army into giving them money to develop. They ran out of war, so these machines never happened. I thought, well, let’s give them more war. Let’s make it twenty years so the tech can really catch on and spread. In what kind of universe could the Civil War have been sustainable for twenty years? The fact is that the Confederacy just didn’t have enough people. They weren’t going to win. Well, let’s say England does get involved and let’s say they break the Union naval blockade. Let’s say Texas is an independent republic because they discovered oil fifty-sixty years sooner and now have this diesel-based economy. Let’s say immigration starts drying up in New York, which it did by the end of the war because they were grabbing German and Irish and Italian immigrants and throwing them on the front lines. There were draft riots about it. This is stuff that actually did happen and give that another fifteen years and it will be even worse. So I ended up with this universe that is sitting on the very cusp of what is sustainable and I hope it’s more apparent in Dreadnought really than in Boneshaker that this war cannot possibly go on much longer. And things have started suggesting themselves. It’s been fun and really interesting.

Boneshaker was this cool steampunk-zombie novel, but you really get that sense in Deadnaught that the world has been opened up very consciously and it gives a sense that the Civil War has been transformed into something bigger and longer, like what the Thirty Years War was to Europe, this endless chaotic conflict.

If you have a war that’s been going on for twenty years, the people who are fighting the war at the end, are not the people who started the war. These are people who were children. Most of their fathers died in the war and now they’re fighting. Looking at wars that have run that long, it was interesting how it will bleed dry whoever is participating in it. It was a fun intellectual exercise, but I get all kinds of hate mail from people complaining about how bad my history is. It’s not bad. It’s alternate. (laughs)

Seriously? They just don’t get it?

Once every week or two I’ll get an email from someone in Seattle going, now this was a fun book but I hope you know that the King Street Station was not even begun until nineteen-oh-whatever. I’m like, yeah, the zombies didn’t bother you? (laughs) You were good with the zombies but you had a hard time with me moving up the train station by thirty years? Give me a break. I knew it hadn’t been built yet. I’m just playing around. If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.

People accept the zombies without question, but the historical details bother them.

Yeah, nobody’s worried about the zombies, but they are so happy to correct me on all these little points. (laughs) Really? Is that all you can find to complain about? I’m going to put that in the win column. My husband says I should have a page on the clockwork century called “Yes, I know.” Yes, I know the Civil War was not going on in 1880. Yes I know...

So now that it has done well and it is a series. How long do you see this alternate history series being?

There’s going to be at least two more books from Tor. I’m working on the sequel to Dreadnought which is called Ganymede. After that the one we’re tentatively going to do is Inexplicable.
I want to tell a Florida story. I’m from Florida and a lot of people figure that Florida didn’t have anything to do with the Civil War, but it actually did. It’s always strange being a native Floridian because many Floridians strongly identify as Southern but most people who are traditionally identified as Southern think they aren’t. You’re constantly fighting to be recognized as part of the losing side. (laughs) I want to do a Florida story and I have some notes on that. And I want to do a D.C. story. I want to end the war in a few books, because the war has to end.

There’s a bunch of different directions I feel like I’ve found my Discworld, if you know Terry Pratchett, where so many stories suggest themselves. It’s fun. I’ve been approached about doing things with it, like roleplaying games. For the first time in my life people are asking me if they can do fanfiction, which is something really new for me. I’m like, just don’t show it to me, don’t try sell it, knock yourself out. It feels like something infinitely expandable.

It does seem to lend itself to not just many stories but many different kinds of stories.

The one I’m working on now, Ganymede, I wanted to do a New Orleans story. I’m from the Gulf coast and I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans. Hunley, the submarine, was actually developed in New Orleans and was scuttled when the yankees took the city in 1862. And poor Hunley drowned in his own machine. I have the two guys who helped him develop it in real life basically continue his research so we have Hunley 4.0 and it’s called the Ganymede. Again, playing with real history and how things would have gone in real life. The yankees took the city in 1862 because it was the most important port in the hemisphere and they knew that they couldn’t let the South keep it. So they took it and they sat on it for the rest of the war. But in this universe, if Texas is allied with the Confederacy and Texas is a very powerful republic, I don’t think Texas would have let them keep it. So you end up with this situation where you have a city that is occupied by Texas because the Confederacy can’t hold it and basically nobody is happy about it. (laughs) There’s a large free black population in New Orleans that was very happy to see the Union. And there are a lot of Southerners who weren’t but now Texas has to do their dirty work for them and it’s a constant reminder of their own failure. And Texas doesn’t want to be there because they came in thinking we’re going to take care of this for a year and now it’s been nine years and they’re stuck. All this stuff you can actually do with real history and muck around with it and have a good time with it. All these things just suggest themselves, so it’s been an awful lot of fun for me.

It’s such a rich period and so much steampunk tends to be British.

There’s a contingent that feels that if it doesn’t happen in England, it doesn’t count. I kinda think that’s bullshit. (laughs) I reject your reality and replace it with my own. People can sit around and fight about that all day. I don’t care. I’m just having a good time and if people like it, hey, come on and play.

At what point when you were working on Boneshaker did the zombies come in? You seem to like zombies.

I do. I love zombies. I don’t know. The funny thing is that I get two reactions to the zombies. It’s always either, oh my god, zombies and steampunk go so well together that’s really brilliant, I can’t believe you did that. Or, oh my god, everybody does zombies with steampunk, you are so stupid. (laughs) There’s no making anybody happy with that. I’m obviously not the first person to put zombies in steampunk. I just really enjoy zombies and I wanted an ever-present threat in the city beyond the gas. I just thought it would be fun. I needed some really good reasons why people would abandon the city and wall it off and zombies just seemed like fun. Honestly, I’m rambling because I don’t have a good reason. (laughs) It sounded like a good idea at that time.

You seem to like zombies, but when you use them, you play with them.

Well it’s never just about zombies. In some respects, they are the monster of our time just because they can stand in for anything. They can stand in for the holocaust or nuclear apocalypse or disease or anything that destroys the grid. The thing about zombie fiction that’s so much fun in general because it’s not just descriptive, it’s prescriptive. It tells you how to survive. Everything from 28 Days Later to Romero, the stuff shows you, when the grid goes down and the shit hits the fan, how do you survive. I think as technology gets more and more away from us, in some respects, there’s this undercurrent of fear. What happens if it goes away because I rely on this so much? What do we do? How do we live?

My dad was in the army and so I lived in Texas and Colorado and spent a lot of time in the West. You find these little frontier towns where there’s horror built into just being this town of a hundred people on the edge of the desert. It’s so fragile anyway that any kind of outside anything can absolutely upend it and kill you all. If your well goes dry. If you weren’t friendly enough with the locals. If if if. This is something that tells us about ourselves and it tells us how we should behave if things go bad. And it can stand in for anything. Zombies are really interesting to me because they can’t be negotiated with. They don’t want anything. If Dracula wants something, you can negotiate with Dracula. The zombie exists only to consume. It’s not going to stop. It will only keep coming forever and ever until it gets you. Zombies are really interesting to me. Vampires promise to make you special. You’ll be really pretty and live forever and maybe be French. (laughs) Zombies strip you of everything that made you special in the first place and you’re just like everybody else.

You really seemed to have a lot of fun with taking actual details and people and playing with them in different ways.

It was interesting playing with people’s loyalties in the Civil war. I’m from the south and spent a total of fourteen years in Tennessee and speculating on alternate Civil War endings is something of a regional past time. (laughs) It was so much more complicated than good guys vs bad guys, especially around the border states where populations were so divided. I mean there were entire cities and counties, both North and South, that try to seceded to the other side. In East Texas and North Georgia, there was a group of people who tried to secede from the Confederacy and form their own state. You end up with this immensely complicated situation. It surprises me how few people know that Kentucky wasn’t a southern state. Everybody thinks it was, but they never seceded. They stayed with the union, but the population there was probably 51/49. It was just so intensely complicated and if it’s been going on for twenty years, it’s going to be even more intensely complicated. Just trying to mess with that and play with it.

The Robertson Hospital and all that that was a real place and Captain Sally was a real person and so it all seemed like it would fit nicely in the story. The Robertson Hospital was this total freak of nature. This old maid had lots of money and said, I’m going to run my own hospital. Robertson had fled, and so she took over his house. If you look back on it now, it’s apparent that the woman was obsessive compulsive. She insisted on everything had to be clean, all the water had to be boiled. Miraculously she had a 93% survival rate in her hospital in the course of the war. And most of the people who died, died towards the end of the war because the hospital had such a good reputation that people who were most badly injured were sent there.

That’s an insanely high survival rate.

For anywhere in the Nineteenth century. Much less in a war hospital. It blew people’s minds. And the funny thing was, the Confederacy said, we need to send you a commanding officer so that you can draw money from the government to run this thing. She said no. (laughs) They said, you need to have somebody so we can give you supplies. No, I’m in charge. They said you can’t be in charge, you need an officer on hand. She said, then make me an officer. She was the only female officer in the Confederacy. They made her a Captain. (laughs) These crazy interesting people who were really there. There were people in Boneshaker who were real to Seattle history for example. Playing with the real stuff in more interesting to me, in a way, even if you’re just completely rendering it unrecognizable. It’s still fun. I will occasionally get letters from school groups that have taken the underground tour from teenagers who have read Boneshaker who go, oh my god, I didn’t know that this part was real and this person was real. So take an interest in your local history. There’s some interesting stuff.

So tell me, what is it you love about steampunk?

I think it’s a perfect storm from a pop cultural standpoint and a social environment standpoint. I often say that steampunk has an underpinning philosophy that’s reduce, reuse and recycle. This idea that you don’t throw things away. You don’t want mass-produced stuff. You want something that you can use and then reuse and find a new use for. I’ve had people misquote me, saying that the Victorians were green. I have never said that. (laughs) I would never say that. I know better than that.

When you can cherry-pick from history, take the good and leave the bad when you can. The idea that things are artisan-made and custom-made and built to last instead of built to be disposable. That’s collided with the Maker movement, the do-it-yourself movement, which is very big on the west coast, especially in California but also further up the coast in Portland and Seattle. That’s collided with the idea of the post-millennium issues and the depletion of the planet’s resources and trying to go green and not waste so much and it’s made this zeitgeist that has made steampunk very appealing. And also I think, as I said earlier, there’s a large crossover with the goth population.

It’s partly because we’ve grown up and we have families and we have day jobs and it’s no longer acceptable to be theatrically sad, but the desire to be theatrical does not go away. So it draws these people who like to play dressup and who are also grownups and who have disposable income. It’s been interesting to watch it gel over the last few years really and I’m having a really good time with it. Like any new subculture, if we can call it that, the first wavers are people who want to decide what counts and what doesn’t. There’s a lot of, you’re doing it wrong. Well I always felt seriously there is nothing punk about allowing a group of strangers on the internet telling you how to participate in your hobby. (laughs) If you’re having fun and they’re a douche, they’re the one with the problem, not you. Just go have a good time with it. Play with it. And as that had started to overwhelm the first wavers it’s become a much more open scene a much more inviting scene and I think a much more appealing scene.

For example, last year I did Steamcon out here at SeaTac -- not quite Seattle, out where the airport is -- and the hotel was filled up and completely sold out. The fire marshall shut it down and said you can’t sell any more memberships. There were people staying in the hotel who weren’t part of the event who while it was going on came and bought memberships because they were already in the hotel and just wanted to participate. Families with little kids and old ladies who thought this was just the coolest thing they had ever seen. There’s a very participatory element. You want to participate. You want to play dressup. You want to customize your stuff. You don’t want something that everybody else has. No two steampunks ever arrive at an event wearing exactly the same thing.

And that’s part of the point of course. Like you said, it’s about reusing and recycling and reinventing.

Exactly. Look at how knitting has exploded over the past ten years. It’s like, I want to make my own stuff. I want to sew. I want to knit. I want to have more control over the processes that bring me the things that I use. I did an event and I was sitting next to Cory Doctorow and he was like the underpinning of this is, love the machinery, hate the factory. At the end of the day, the irony of so much of steampunk is that the stuff we’re customizing is still built by children in factories in third world nations. But it is a good faith effort to get away from that. To become less dependent on that. And it’s interesting to me to watch people who take an interest in it become more educated about the products they consume. Where was this made? What’s in it? Who produced this?

I ended up having a conversation with my mother about it. My mother has no interest in any of this, I assure you. (laughs) She was asking me about some stuff and steampunk and consumer culture and we had a civilized conversation about this and why it’s important to take note of where your money goes when you buy things especially disposable things. It’s very very interesting to me and I don’t think it’s one thing. It’s a bunch of things that have collided to make the zeitgeist happen.

What’s so interesting is that we could rattle off a list of steampunk books or comics, but there’s no canon or iconic work.

You’re right. Steampunk will break through the day that it has its Dracula or Lord of the Rings. Say for example you’re talking to straight laced parents about goths, you can say, you know Dracula? It’s kinda like that. Or for fantasy and D&D, you know Lord of the Rings? It’s like that. Steampunk doesn’t have that yet. It doesn’t have something that is so widely known that even somebody’s grandparent can go, oh yeah, I know what you’re talking about. Believe me when I’ve had to sit down with my dad a couple times and go, okay, it’s kinda like this. And he gets it now, but he was like, I just don’t get it. I’m like, okay, you know the film The Wild Wild West? It looks like that but it’s way better than that. Do you know the comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? No. Do you know the movie? Yes. Well it’s like that but way better than that. We don’t have anything good that we can point at that people are familiar with. There’s all this disclaiming. It’s like that, only it doesn’t suck. (laughs) And until we can say, it’s like that without the disclaimer, it will not have made it through to the mainstream.

So to wrap thing up, I’m curious how you describe Dreadnought to people?

I always boil everything down. I have a paragraph. It is a steampunk pulp adventure about a widowed Confederate nurse who is heading across the American west to find her dying father with Confederate spies, Union officers, a caboose full of mysterious corpses sealed into storage, undead Mexican separatists and a steampunk Texas ranger. (laughs) I don’t want people to go, oh, this is just a travelogue. No it’s not.

It’s definitely not just a travelogue. I hope we get to read a lot more and to read the end of the war as you write it.

I hope so too. It probably won’t be in anything that’s in the queue right now. Like I said we’ve got Dreadnought and then Ganymede and Inexplicable. And maybe a couple side projects with Subterranean, we’ll see. If these do well and Tor wants more books, it will end in the next batch.

And then you have another book, Bloodshot.

It’s a really really unrelated thing. It’s an urban fantasy. Fabulous, trashy fun. I write a lot of horror and a lot of dark stuff and I just wanted to do something lighter and kind of funny. It’s called Bloodshot and it’ll be out from Bantam in February. It’s modern and goofy fun. There’s an obsessive compulsive vampire who has a Cuban drag queen as a sidekick, who used to be a Navy Seal. (laughs) Again, I wanted to have fun. If I’m not having fun, I may as well go get a desk job.