Ghosts by Gaslight

Author:Jack Dann
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780061999710
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Afterword to “Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism”

I know some people have memories that go back to babyhood, but not me. The first memory that I’m sure is my own real memory—and not re-created from what adults told me—comes from a holiday in the seaside town of Fleetwood, in Lancashire, England. I must have been about four or five, and what I remember is Fleetwood pier, which had been recently destroyed by fire. It stuck far out into the sea, a wreckage of tangled, twisted girders, and not just tangled, not just twisted, but racked and contorted like an expression of agony, a frozen shriek of pain. There you have the whole germ and genesis of “Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism.”

I’d now count “Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism” as a “steampunk” story. Ten years ago, I’d hardly heard of “steampunk”—I mean, I’d heard of the word, but I’d never thought it had anything to do with me. But I was wrong—I’d been blindly blundering my way towards steampunk from a long time before then. The fascination with nineteenth-century culture and Dickensian atmospheres was already there in The Black Crusade and The Vicar of Morbing Vyle (the latter my first novel, published in 1993). And the fascination with old-fashioned steam-age machinery was there in the industrial scenery of the Humen Camp in the three Ferren books and in the fabulous contraptions of (again) The Black Crusade. When I completed Worldshaker and it was instantly categorized as “steampunk,” I realised I’d discovered my own true home. Or as the poet said, it was like coming home and knowing the place for the first time.

“Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism” was an amazingly difficult story to write, because I couldn’t get the voice I needed. I started to write in first person, rewrote in third person, tried again with a different-sounding first person, another go at third person, and finally—phew! gasp!—hit upon a first-person voice that sounded just right. I guess the problem was the contradiction between using formal vocabulary and long sentences, as necessary for a nineteenth-century feel, but also conveying intense emotion and an underlying thrill of horror. My lifeline was Edgar Allan Poe—I confess, I actually read a Poe short story every morning before starting work on “Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism.” I’ve never put myself under an influence in that way before! Yet that too was like coming home, because Poe was the first great love of my adult reading life, which began when a German teacher at school decided to forget about teaching German and instead spent a whole period reading us “The Tell-Tale Heart.” But that’s another story . . .

—RICHARD HARLAND

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.