Cherie Priest is one of those writers who became an overnight success after more than a decade of hard work. She has two book series going on right now. Her new book is Bloodshot, an urban fantasy novel featuring an obsessive compulsive vampire thief nicknamed Chesire Red who has an ex-Navy SEAL Cuban drag queen sidekick. Its a great, fun read with a very different take on vampires than most books offer.
For most of us, though, she is the author of Boneshaker and Dreadnought, which stand as two of the best steampunk novels. Part of a project that Priest calls The Clockwork Century the books stand alone but offer a very unique vision of an alternate history in which the Civil War spanned a generation and the United States looks very different. Our conversation veered from local history and the Seattle Underground tour to why zombies are the monster of our times to what makes steampunk great for ex-goths. In short, we should all hope to be as cool as Cherie Priest.
ALEX DUEBEN: Youve been at this for a while. Are you still on pins and needles when a book comes out?
CHERIE PRIEST: Oh, totally. The running joke at Tor is that Im an overnight success after my seventh book in ten years. (laughs) Nobody read anything of mine until Boneshaker. I sat up last night and wrote up a [blog] post and changed all my bios and updated all of my links. It feels like back to school shopping if that makes any sense. (laughs)
AD: Now Dreadnought is a sequel to Boneshaker and I dont 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.
CP: 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 didnt 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 doesnt take off, what Im 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, Ill show the entire rest of the country and what better way to go from the East Coast to the West Coast. Its not a travelogue. Theres a lot going on in it. But you do get to go through the border states and see the unincorporated West. Theres some intrigue and spying and steampunk Texas rangers and undead Mexican separatists.
AD: 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 wasnt seen?
CP: 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. Thats 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. Theres a big steampunk scene here. I think largely because theres a big aging goth scene here, not to put too fine a point on it. (laughs) I count myself in that number. Im 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 its 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, lets give them more war. Lets 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 didnt have enough people. They werent going to win. Well, lets say England does get involved and lets say they break the Union naval blockade. Lets say Texas is an independent republic because they discovered oil fifty-sixty years sooner and now have this diesel-based economy. Lets 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 its more apparent in Dreadnought really than in Boneshaker that this war cannot possibly go on much longer. And things have started suggesting themselves. Its been fun and really interesting.
AD: 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.
CP: If you have a war thats 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 theyre 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. Its not bad. Its alternate. (laughs)
AD: Seriously? They just dont get it?
CP: Once every week or two Ill 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. Im like, yeah, the zombies didnt 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 hadnt been built yet. Im just playing around. If youre not having fun, youre doing it wrong.
AD: People accept the zombies without question, but the historical details bother them.
CP: Yeah, nobodys 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? Im 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...
AD: So now that it has done well and it is a series. How long do you see this alternate history series being?
CP: Theres going to be at least two more books from Tor. Im working on the sequel to Dreadnought which is called Ganymede. After that the one were tentatively going to do is Inexplicable.
I want to tell a Florida story. Im from Florida and a lot of people figure that Florida didnt have anything to do with the Civil War, but it actually did. Its always strange being a native Floridian because many Floridians strongly identify as Southern but most people who are traditionally identified as Southern think they arent. Youre 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.
Theres a bunch of different directions I feel like Ive found my Discworld, if you know Terry Pratchett, where so many stories suggest themselves. Its fun. Ive 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. Im like, just dont show it to me, dont try sell it, knock yourself out. It feels like something infinitely expandable.
AD: It does seem to lend itself to not just many stories but many different kinds of stories.
CP: The one Im working on now, Ganymede, I wanted to do a New Orleans story. Im from the Gulf coast and Ive 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 its 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 couldnt 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 dont 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 cant hold it and basically nobody is happy about it. (laughs) Theres a large free black population in New Orleans that was very happy to see the Union. And there are a lot of Southerners who werent but now Texas has to do their dirty work for them and its a constant reminder of their own failure. And Texas doesnt want to be there because they came in thinking were going to take care of this for a year and now its been nine years and theyre 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 its been an awful lot of fun for me.
AD: Its such a rich period and so much steampunk tends to be British.
CP: Theres a contingent that feels that if it doesnt happen in England, it doesnt count. I kinda think thats bullshit. (laughs) I reject your reality and replace it with my own. People can sit around and fight about that all day. I dont care. Im just having a good time and if people like it, hey, come on and play.
AD: At what point when you were working on Boneshaker did the zombies come in? You seem to like zombies.
CP: I do. I love zombies. I dont know. The funny thing is that I get two reactions to the zombies. Its always either, oh my god, zombies and steampunk go so well together thats really brilliant, I cant believe you did that. Or, oh my god, everybody does zombies with steampunk, you are so stupid. (laughs) Theres no making anybody happy with that. Im 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, Im rambling because I dont have a good reason. (laughs) It sounded like a good idea at that time.
AD: You seem to like zombies, but when you use them, you play with them.
CP: Well its 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 thats so much fun in general because its not just descriptive, its 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, theres 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 theres horror built into just being this town of a hundred people on the edge of the desert. Its so fragile anyway that any kind of outside anything can absolutely upend it and kill you all. If your well goes dry. If you werent 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 cant be negotiated with. They dont want anything. If Dracula wants something, you can negotiate with Dracula. The zombie exists only to consume. Its 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. Youll 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 youre just like everybody else.
AD: You really seemed to have a lot of fun with taking actual details and people and playing with them in different ways.
CP: It was interesting playing with peoples loyalties in the Civil war. Im 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 wasnt 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 its been going on for twenty years, its 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, Im going to run my own hospital. Robertson had fled, and so she took over his house. If you look back on it now, its 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.
AD: Thats an insanely high survival rate.
CP: For anywhere in the Nineteenth century. Much less in a war hospital. It blew peoples 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, Im in charge. They said you cant 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 youre just completely rendering it unrecognizable. Its 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 didnt know that this part was real and this person was real. So take an interest in your local history. Theres some interesting stuff.
AD: So tell me, what is it you love about steampunk?
CP: I think its a perfect storm from a pop cultural standpoint and a social environment standpoint. I often say that steampunk has an underpinning philosophy thats reduce, reuse and recycle. This idea that you dont throw things away. You dont want mass-produced stuff. You want something that you can use and then reuse and find a new use for. Ive 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. Thats 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. Thats collided with the idea of the post-millennium issues and the depletion of the planets resources and trying to go green and not waste so much and its made this zeitgeist that has made steampunk very appealing. And also I think, as I said earlier, theres a large crossover with the goth population.
Its partly because weve grown up and we have families and we have day jobs and its 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. Its been interesting to watch it gel over the last few years really and Im 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 doesnt. Theres a lot of, youre 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 youre having fun and theyre a douche, theyre 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 its 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 cant sell any more memberships. There were people staying in the hotel who werent 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. Theres a very participatory element. You want to participate. You want to play dressup. You want to customize your stuff. You dont want something that everybody else has. No two steampunks ever arrive at an event wearing exactly the same thing.
AD: And thats part of the point of course. Like you said, its about reusing and recycling and reinventing.
CP: Exactly. Look at how knitting has exploded over the past ten years. Its 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 were 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 its interesting to me to watch people who take an interest in it become more educated about the products they consume. Where was this made? Whats 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 its important to take note of where your money goes when you buy things especially disposable things. Its very very interesting to me and I dont think its one thing. Its a bunch of things that have collided to make the zeitgeist happen.
AD: Whats so interesting is that we could rattle off a list of steampunk books or comics, but theres no canon or iconic work.
CP: Youre right. Steampunk will break through the day that it has its Dracula or Lord of the Rings. Say for example youre talking to straight laced parents about goths, you can say, you know Dracula? Its kinda like that. Or for fantasy and D&D, you know Lord of the Rings? Its like that. Steampunk doesnt have that yet. It doesnt have something that is so widely known that even somebodys grandparent can go, oh yeah, I know what youre talking about. Believe me when Ive had to sit down with my dad a couple times and go, okay, its kinda like this. And he gets it now, but he was like, I just dont get it. Im like, okay, you know the film The Wild Wild West? It looks like that but its way better than that. Do you know the comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? No. Do you know the movie? Yes. Well its like that but way better than that. We dont have anything good that we can point at that people are familiar with. Theres all this disclaiming. Its like that, only it doesnt suck. (laughs) And until we can say, its like that without the disclaimer, it will not have made it through to the mainstream.
AD: So to wrap thing up, Im curious how you describe Dreadnought to people?
CP: 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 dont want people to go, oh, this is just a travelogue. No its not.
AD: Its 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.
CP: I hope so too. It probably wont be in anything thats in the queue right now. Like I said weve got Dreadnought and then Ganymede and Inexplicable. And maybe a couple side projects with Subterranean, well see. If these do well and Tor wants more books, it will end in the next batch.
AD: And then you have another book, Bloodshot.
CP: Its a really really unrelated thing. Its 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. Its called Bloodshot and itll be out from Bantam in February. Its modern and goofy fun. Theres 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 Im not having fun, I may as well go get a desk job.
For most of us, though, she is the author of Boneshaker and Dreadnought, which stand as two of the best steampunk novels. Part of a project that Priest calls The Clockwork Century the books stand alone but offer a very unique vision of an alternate history in which the Civil War spanned a generation and the United States looks very different. Our conversation veered from local history and the Seattle Underground tour to why zombies are the monster of our times to what makes steampunk great for ex-goths. In short, we should all hope to be as cool as Cherie Priest.
ALEX DUEBEN: Youve been at this for a while. Are you still on pins and needles when a book comes out?
CHERIE PRIEST: Oh, totally. The running joke at Tor is that Im an overnight success after my seventh book in ten years. (laughs) Nobody read anything of mine until Boneshaker. I sat up last night and wrote up a [blog] post and changed all my bios and updated all of my links. It feels like back to school shopping if that makes any sense. (laughs)
AD: Now Dreadnought is a sequel to Boneshaker and I dont 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.
CP: 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 didnt 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 doesnt take off, what Im 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, Ill show the entire rest of the country and what better way to go from the East Coast to the West Coast. Its not a travelogue. Theres a lot going on in it. But you do get to go through the border states and see the unincorporated West. Theres some intrigue and spying and steampunk Texas rangers and undead Mexican separatists.
AD: 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 wasnt seen?
CP: 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. Thats 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. Theres a big steampunk scene here. I think largely because theres a big aging goth scene here, not to put too fine a point on it. (laughs) I count myself in that number. Im 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 its 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, lets give them more war. Lets 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 didnt have enough people. They werent going to win. Well, lets say England does get involved and lets say they break the Union naval blockade. Lets say Texas is an independent republic because they discovered oil fifty-sixty years sooner and now have this diesel-based economy. Lets 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 its more apparent in Dreadnought really than in Boneshaker that this war cannot possibly go on much longer. And things have started suggesting themselves. Its been fun and really interesting.
AD: 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.
CP: If you have a war thats 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 theyre 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. Its not bad. Its alternate. (laughs)
AD: Seriously? They just dont get it?
CP: Once every week or two Ill 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. Im like, yeah, the zombies didnt 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 hadnt been built yet. Im just playing around. If youre not having fun, youre doing it wrong.
AD: People accept the zombies without question, but the historical details bother them.
CP: Yeah, nobodys 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? Im 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...
AD: So now that it has done well and it is a series. How long do you see this alternate history series being?
CP: Theres going to be at least two more books from Tor. Im working on the sequel to Dreadnought which is called Ganymede. After that the one were tentatively going to do is Inexplicable.
I want to tell a Florida story. Im from Florida and a lot of people figure that Florida didnt have anything to do with the Civil War, but it actually did. Its always strange being a native Floridian because many Floridians strongly identify as Southern but most people who are traditionally identified as Southern think they arent. Youre 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.
Theres a bunch of different directions I feel like Ive found my Discworld, if you know Terry Pratchett, where so many stories suggest themselves. Its fun. Ive 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. Im like, just dont show it to me, dont try sell it, knock yourself out. It feels like something infinitely expandable.
AD: It does seem to lend itself to not just many stories but many different kinds of stories.
CP: The one Im working on now, Ganymede, I wanted to do a New Orleans story. Im from the Gulf coast and Ive 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 its 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 couldnt 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 dont 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 cant hold it and basically nobody is happy about it. (laughs) Theres a large free black population in New Orleans that was very happy to see the Union. And there are a lot of Southerners who werent but now Texas has to do their dirty work for them and its a constant reminder of their own failure. And Texas doesnt want to be there because they came in thinking were going to take care of this for a year and now its been nine years and theyre 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 its been an awful lot of fun for me.
AD: Its such a rich period and so much steampunk tends to be British.
CP: Theres a contingent that feels that if it doesnt happen in England, it doesnt count. I kinda think thats bullshit. (laughs) I reject your reality and replace it with my own. People can sit around and fight about that all day. I dont care. Im just having a good time and if people like it, hey, come on and play.
AD: At what point when you were working on Boneshaker did the zombies come in? You seem to like zombies.
CP: I do. I love zombies. I dont know. The funny thing is that I get two reactions to the zombies. Its always either, oh my god, zombies and steampunk go so well together thats really brilliant, I cant believe you did that. Or, oh my god, everybody does zombies with steampunk, you are so stupid. (laughs) Theres no making anybody happy with that. Im 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, Im rambling because I dont have a good reason. (laughs) It sounded like a good idea at that time.
AD: You seem to like zombies, but when you use them, you play with them.
CP: Well its 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 thats so much fun in general because its not just descriptive, its 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, theres 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 theres horror built into just being this town of a hundred people on the edge of the desert. Its so fragile anyway that any kind of outside anything can absolutely upend it and kill you all. If your well goes dry. If you werent 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 cant be negotiated with. They dont want anything. If Dracula wants something, you can negotiate with Dracula. The zombie exists only to consume. Its 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. Youll 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 youre just like everybody else.
AD: You really seemed to have a lot of fun with taking actual details and people and playing with them in different ways.
CP: It was interesting playing with peoples loyalties in the Civil war. Im 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 wasnt 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 its been going on for twenty years, its 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, Im going to run my own hospital. Robertson had fled, and so she took over his house. If you look back on it now, its 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.
AD: Thats an insanely high survival rate.
CP: For anywhere in the Nineteenth century. Much less in a war hospital. It blew peoples 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, Im in charge. They said you cant 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 youre just completely rendering it unrecognizable. Its 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 didnt know that this part was real and this person was real. So take an interest in your local history. Theres some interesting stuff.
AD: So tell me, what is it you love about steampunk?
CP: I think its a perfect storm from a pop cultural standpoint and a social environment standpoint. I often say that steampunk has an underpinning philosophy thats reduce, reuse and recycle. This idea that you dont throw things away. You dont want mass-produced stuff. You want something that you can use and then reuse and find a new use for. Ive 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. Thats 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. Thats collided with the idea of the post-millennium issues and the depletion of the planets resources and trying to go green and not waste so much and its made this zeitgeist that has made steampunk very appealing. And also I think, as I said earlier, theres a large crossover with the goth population.
Its partly because weve grown up and we have families and we have day jobs and its 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. Its been interesting to watch it gel over the last few years really and Im 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 doesnt. Theres a lot of, youre 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 youre having fun and theyre a douche, theyre 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 its 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 cant sell any more memberships. There were people staying in the hotel who werent 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. Theres a very participatory element. You want to participate. You want to play dressup. You want to customize your stuff. You dont want something that everybody else has. No two steampunks ever arrive at an event wearing exactly the same thing.
AD: And thats part of the point of course. Like you said, its about reusing and recycling and reinventing.
CP: Exactly. Look at how knitting has exploded over the past ten years. Its 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 were 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 its interesting to me to watch people who take an interest in it become more educated about the products they consume. Where was this made? Whats 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 its important to take note of where your money goes when you buy things especially disposable things. Its very very interesting to me and I dont think its one thing. Its a bunch of things that have collided to make the zeitgeist happen.
AD: Whats so interesting is that we could rattle off a list of steampunk books or comics, but theres no canon or iconic work.
CP: Youre right. Steampunk will break through the day that it has its Dracula or Lord of the Rings. Say for example youre talking to straight laced parents about goths, you can say, you know Dracula? Its kinda like that. Or for fantasy and D&D, you know Lord of the Rings? Its like that. Steampunk doesnt have that yet. It doesnt have something that is so widely known that even somebodys grandparent can go, oh yeah, I know what youre talking about. Believe me when Ive had to sit down with my dad a couple times and go, okay, its kinda like this. And he gets it now, but he was like, I just dont get it. Im like, okay, you know the film The Wild Wild West? It looks like that but its way better than that. Do you know the comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? No. Do you know the movie? Yes. Well its like that but way better than that. We dont have anything good that we can point at that people are familiar with. Theres all this disclaiming. Its like that, only it doesnt suck. (laughs) And until we can say, its like that without the disclaimer, it will not have made it through to the mainstream.
AD: So to wrap thing up, Im curious how you describe Dreadnought to people?
CP: 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 dont want people to go, oh, this is just a travelogue. No its not.
AD: Its 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.
CP: I hope so too. It probably wont be in anything thats in the queue right now. Like I said weve got Dreadnought and then Ganymede and Inexplicable. And maybe a couple side projects with Subterranean, well see. If these do well and Tor wants more books, it will end in the next batch.
AD: And then you have another book, Bloodshot.
CP: Its a really really unrelated thing. Its 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. Its called Bloodshot and itll be out from Bantam in February. Its modern and goofy fun. Theres 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 Im not having fun, I may as well go get a desk job.