Babel Clash

Perceptive chap, this Mr. Tchaikovsky.

I think he’s absolutely correct in what he says about the grounding of characters in an urban setting. I’d add that urban settings are also easier for us, as the reader, to relate to, and that through that they also make it easier for us to relate to the characters that populate them. After all, nearly all of us know what it’s like to live in a big conurbation, understand the social structure and fabric of a city. To have a character or set of characters embedded in that type of setting always us to instantly get inside their head. We know what it’s like for Batman wandering the streets of Gotham at night; much harder to equate an explicitly magical landscape with our own experiences.

I think there’s another key thing here about urban settings that we haven’t touched on (and this is also an important point in what Adrian was leading up to about steampunk), and that’s the city as character. In a lot of truly great urban fantasy the city itself is alive. Not literally, of course (although I wouldn’t ever rule that out), but metaphorically. The setting becomes a character in the story. It has a personality. We care about it; we want to find out what happens to it next, we wonder what will become of the city if our heroes fail (or succeed). Batman is diminished without Gotham. When he does get into his Batshuttle and go into space to fight the giant starfish, he becomes something less. He becomes another Superman. But when he’s fighting villains in the familiar streets of Gotham, we know exactly who he is. Gotham identifies him.

Adrian points us towards some excellent examples of urban fantasy, and I think all of those exemplify that notion of the city as character. Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station and Jeff Vandermeer’s City of Saints and Madmen are particular highlights. To those I’d also add M. John Harrison’s Viriconium books, as well as Mark Charan Newton’s Nights of Villjamur, all of which are well worth your time.

I think it is this sense of the urban setting coming to life that’s really at the heart of the steampunk movement, too. The central conceit of most steampunk is that the Victorian age – that great, industrial period of social reform (counterbalanced by the horrors of the class divide) – was somehow altered by the introduction and development of new ideas. These ideas tend towards the industrial or technological – so that Victorian inventors build a clockwork computer or such like, and the stories that follow then consider the socio-political impact of those ideas and technologies. And where best to ground those stories? London, of course: the great metropolis of the age, the hub of the British Empire. London is the heart of the Victorian world. London is one of the central characters in the majority of steampunk fiction, just as it was in the novels of Dickens, or Conan Doyle, writing at the time. And London does for steampunk exactly what Gotham does for Batman – it grounds its characters, makes everything matter, and as Adrain says, shows us the consequences of their actions.

What is interesting, however, is the recent trend for steampunk to transcend these London-centric roots and cross the water. Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, for example, is a fantastic steampunk novel that takes place entirely in the US. And my own Ghosts of Manhattan, which is centered in Manhattan in the late 1920s. But what’s key here is that both of those novels retain that link to the urban, to the city. It’s as vital to steampunk as the cogs and the steam engines and the airships.

Then, of course, there’s the secondary world urban fantasy with a steampunk flavour – and that’s where I think Adrian is better placed to rejoin us…

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