Embracing the Terra Unknown
I admit it: I’ve only written one steampunk story in my life.Normally, this admission would be something I’d keep close to my chest. I’d bury it down there with the packs of baseball cards I used to steal as a wayward pre-teen, and that time I lied to a girl at summer camp after I found a ring and gave it to her, only for her to get chewed out for thievery by her counselor who lost it (!) Sometimes the brightest intentions yield the darkest results.
But I’m proud of my first foray into steampunklandia, a terra incognita that partially resembles our own world. I’m grateful to Xchyler Publishing for including my tale in their new anthology, the aptly titled Terra Mechanica. It’s basically the story of a young woman taken under the wing of a gifted inventor named Dr. Pax who wants to change the world—first, by proving that his wild, pneumatic science (pressurized air and wind) is capable of carrying a craft all the way around the globe.
Pax has all the right accouterments to accomplish his great task: special monocles for seeing, special Morse gloves for tapping, and a desire to reach past the unknown that borders on hubris. He also has a secret weapon.
That secret weapon is Dr. Pax’s seventeen year-old Turkish mechanic, Nidj. Nidj is like the foreign exchange student you might have taunted on the bus all year, and then, at some party at the end of the year she broke your arm. If one thing can be said about Nidj it’s that she’s resilient. Through horrible circumstances she learns to adapt and overcome, battling the unknown in her own way . . . and coming out swinging.
I suppose it helps in all this swinging that one of her arms is no longer human, not entirely. It’s been modified by Dr. Pax into a mechanical tool which allows his protégé to scan and fix pieces of their ship, the Whirly-Bird, or, if things get ugly, hurl razor-sharp disks at enemies’ heads. Who knows what she could do to unfaithful boyfriends.
Nidj is a badass. Maybe that’s my own hubris talking, but I’m not ashamed to say it. She’s everything I’d want to be if I could let go of my fears (though I’d like to retain my appendages, and incidentally, my manhood). I fell in love with Nidj the day I doodled a headstrong girl standing on the wing of a ship, legs fiercely astride, mechanical arm raised in the air as if taunting you to try to steal her ship.
In order to ease the effects of high-altitude maneuvering, I drew a mask that Dr. Pax would have dreamed up: a modified conch shell, complete with a breathing and Morse code apparatus. Looking back, I thought I must have stolen the idea from a Miyazaki film, although I’ve searched and searched and haven’t found evidence of the theft yet (I wouldn’t be ashamed to admit it—Miyazaki is king!).
Gazing up through the epileptic pen strokes of my excitement, my character seemed to wink up at me, as if wanting a life of her own. I felt like Victor Frankenstein, or perhaps like Dr. Pax himself, smiling down on his greatest creation, a human-pneumatic girl.
I may not understand the magic that goes into writing a good story. I’m learning each day how to write better, leaner, with great clarity as well as great subtlety. With a great editorial team behind me at Xchyler, the learning curve has become a dream not a nightmare. But if I could say one thing about writing, especially about writing about foreign and potentially intimidating subjects, it would be this: EMBRACE THE UNKNOWN.
Yes, you do need to know your subject to write about it. Nobody wants a vampire story about a baby who’s just abnormally teething and bites his mother on the neck by accident. But I didn’t at the outset of my tale need to know everything about the world I was creating—that came later.
I needed to learn Morse Code to understand Nidj’s relay system from below deck to inside the cabin; I needed to learn about plants that had life-preserving aloes if Nidj’s ship ever crashed into the jungle; I needed to smell and taste the desperation of horrible circumstances as if I myself had been flung head-first into them. I needed all these things, but I needed Nidj first.
I should also say that no part of the learning process that came later was intimidating. It was inspiring. After all, I just wanted to tell the story of a total badass steampunk chick, right? I knew that if I could transfer my overwhelming love for my character to the reader, then I could probably place Nidj in the middle of a supermarket going through her grocery list and still keep your interest . . . at least for a page or so.
You can build a bridge through the unknown, and like a lot of things, it begins with love. That is the closest reaching for elusive stars that I’ve learned, and even when you come up short, you still come up with everything.
I hope you enjoy reading “Dr. Pax’s Great Unsinkable Bird” and all the whirling, buzzing, steam-powered adventures that wait inside Terra Mechanica. If you don’t, lookout for razor-sharp disks hurled from above. They really can put a damper on an evening.
A lover of graphic novels and the occult fiction of the late great John Bellairs, James gravitated towards the paranormal world from an early age. Watching the first episode of The X-Files with his older brother was a transformative experience, as well as an education in great storytelling and mythmaking.
Since “growing up,” James has devoted his time to finding his voice through writing, publishing short fiction in The Portland Review, and winning two international short story competitions for science fiction and horror. When he’s not writing, he tours with his incredible wife Amy as “The Crooked Angels,” an Americana duo specializing in rocking your socks off.
Potter’s short story, “Dr. Pax’s Great Unsinkable Bird,” is included in Terra Mechanica: A Steampunk Anthology, slated for release May 31, 2014.
Potter is currently collaborating with artist Klaus “Plaid Klaus” Shmidheiser in the graphic novel series “Glimmer Society.”
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