Is Victorian London The Only Possible Setting for a Steampunk Novel?

[Lia Keyes]

You know the answer to this is no, right? 

Where is your current work-in-progress set? How have you gone about researching it?

 

As you scroll down through the comments, don't forget there are several pages of them, so click through the numbers to read them. :)

 

 

[Hugh Ashton]

I had fun finding a location to place a 1920s Confederate trans-Atlantic airship station. In the end, I went to Google Maps, and found a place that had lots of rail connections (my 1920s Confederacy was almost automobile-less), was a fair way from the sea, and also had a lake for soft emergency landings. Cordele, GA – the watermelon capital of the USA, apparently, and a place I have never visited. I found out some things about the place, though, and it served its purpose admirably until I discovered that the lake was an artificial lake created as part of a New Deal public works project in the 1930s. Oops. I had to rework this to have the visiting Germans come and dam the river to create the lake.

[Darcy Drake]

I haven't begun my research at all because it's the end of the semester for me and I have about 24k left to go on my WIP, BUT my steampunk book, my next project, is going to be set in Russia, right before the Russo-Japanese War. There will be a lot... A LOT... of research to do to get the essence of that time period, the capital, right and also incorporate steampunk into it. Create my own alternate history. So when it comes to research, I will be lurking around all the pros and sponging off their hints and tips.

[Hugh Ashton]

Interesting period - my NaNiWriMo piece is largely set in pre-Revolutionary Russia. It involves V.I.Ulyanov, and "Bloody Brian" Finch-Malloy, one of the heroes of Beneath Gray Skies, the book mentioned above. I've had great fun inventing a psychopathic villain, but it's going to be at least the second half of 2011 before the whole book appears. There are lots of (real-life) steampunk elements - Google for Zaamurets and Tsar Tank for descriptions of the main non-human "characters". Stranger than fiction!

[Richard Johnson]

My setting would be an alt-history North America in which the Revolutionary War did not happen. England continued colonizing and expanding to the west with France, Spain and Russia colonizing in the Plains, Southwest and Northwest respectively. Numerous border skirmishes and two or three major conflicts have driven technology both in Europe and the colonies, obviously with steam power being a major player in that technology.

So far my research has been focused on the land division and natural resources that would drive competition between the various nations. I'm working on some ideas to incorporate Native Americans into the equation as allies and participants in the colonization, with the most likely manner of making this happen being treaties during times of conflict.

[Hugh Ashton]

Now that would be interesting. I think what would be fun there would be introducing another player into the mix who didn't play any real-life role in the development of North America - for example, Sweden takes over parts of the Canadian eastern coast (Gustavus Adolphus Land), throwing out the French, and New York becomes New Stockholm. But you are right to have the Russians moving south through BC into Washington/Oregon - it's tempting in another timeline simply to have "Seward's Folly" invalidated by Congress and leave Alaska as a Russian colony/oblast (with a tunnel/bridge under/over the Bering Strait, giving the Russians the Moscow-Sitka rail link.

[Richard Johnson]

Well, what about the notion that the original Icelandic settlers at Vinland (far NE portion of Canada) were actually able to prosper in that region, actually gaining a foothold some 400-500 years prior to Columbus' arrival? With that settlement taking root, growing, and eventually expanding we might see development of the NA continent some four centuries prior to what actually happened. Following that track we might see the NE portion of the current US being settled by Nordic people rather than English. Trade would have been established several centuries earlier as well, affecting the economies throughout Europe.

[Hugh Ashton]

Now this is getting interesting. If the Vikings survived, with occasional contact with Europe (say the fur trade with an annual argosy, similar to the Spanish flotas) up to say the 15th-16th century, and developed a culture that ignored Christianity, but otherwise mimicked Northern European development, perhaps a couple of centuries later...

How to treat the relationships between these neo-Vikings and the First Peoples?

[Andrew P. Mayer]

My story is set in New York City in 1880.

I've researched the hell out of it, from books, web, chatting with experts (ie, New Yorkers), and taking a few trips Eastward to visit landmarks in the city that are still period.

I'm also that most mythical of creatures—a native New Yorker, so I have magical powers that I can use to draw up and channel the spirits of the city from the very asphalt while I walk its streets.

All that said, I make no claims to genuine authenticity, just a solid feeling world.

[Michal Wojcik]

I had one story set in St. Petersburg, geography drawn from an 1871 map with some creative extrapolation.  That was the only time I used a "real" geographical location for a Steampunk story, really, and I already knew a great deal of Russian history.   I'm glad to see others haven't neglected the land of the Czars as a viable, and to me, more interesting setting than England.

 

That being said, Qing China and Moghul India both strike me as fascinating possibilities.  And, most of all, Africa, where airships supply Timbuktu in the still-thriving Empire of Mali, the Zulus have kicked out the British, and great locomotives carry ivory to the Swahili Coast from Zimbabwe.

[Penny Ash]

Definitely not. There's the entire Victorian era world.

I have two set in the Old West, one in North Africa, one in China, and of course the Shakespeare which doesn't have a setting yet.

I read. A lot. Journals from the era, history, scientific encyclopedias, dictionaries, books and magazines from the era, myths, legends, and tons of anthropology as well as anything I can get my hands on that looks even remotely related 

[Karen L. Syed]

We just watched "Island at the Top of the World" the other night. You all know the one, where the man goes off to the Antarctic to find his missing son. He hires/buys an airship and his captain. When they get there they find Astragaarde where the Vikings have survived and flourished, if you will.

 

So this should be a pretty easy premise.

Hugh Ashton said:

Now this is getting interesting. If the Vikings survived, with occasional contact with Europe (say the fur trade with an annual argosy, similar to the Spanish flotas) up to say the 15th-16th century, and developed a culture that ignored Christianity, but otherwise mimicked Northern European development, perhaps a couple of centuries later...

How to treat the relationships between these neo-Vikings and the First Peoples?

[Karen L. Syed]

I have a book that I have yet to actually pick a location. Written 50K words and will hopefully figure that out soon enough though.

 

I do have the bare bones of a short story that I am setting around Sierra Leone. It has some very interesting political issues and I figure the landscape is ripe for my vivid imagination.