Tag Archives: asian history

Asian Steampunkery: Part 1

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I love books. I love science and technology. And I LOVE crafting so when it was time to figure out a unique gift to create for the readers at my table for Barbara Vey’s reader luncheon, I had to combine all that geekery into making steampunk books inspired by my Gunpowder Chronicles series.

But not any steampunk books would do. Oh no. *tee hee*

First, after a round of Youtube and Pinterest research, I settled on a method of creating books that looked old and leatherbound. Now let me tell you, I didn’t just come to that conclusion in an afternoon. There was crumpled paper everywhere and prototypes and and afternoon where I hacked through an entire old book with an Exacto knife. Then decided that was probably overkill.

Now after that was settled, I bought a bunch of empty book boxes at Michael’s. But how to really make them fit the spirit of Opium War steampunk? My research focused a lot on the development of scientific thought and technology in Asia so, what would be better than to feature all those awesome books? (Many of which I couldn’t read, but I could still look at the diagrams…)

So here’s two of the samples. I’ll post the others as I get the descriptions completed:

The Fire Drake Manual

book_firedrake
AND…I also included illustrations from each book inside the box. Like this one for a Ming era fire arrow rocket launcher.

Fire_arrow_rocket_launcher

The Illustrated Compendium of Clever Devices

book_karakuri

Woodblock print from original book:

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Are they the geekiest crafts in all of geek town, or what?

I have to go now, but will be back to post all the books. There were seven different books in all. Excuse my translations, these were done quickly so I could keep track of them while making the books:

book_labels_steampunk_books

History and Worldbuilding

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My critique partners and I were chatting it up last night and the topic of writing historicals and research came up. They asked me how long I researched before I felt ready to write and I told them not much. I just jumped into the story and researched as I went along. Of course, I wasn’t going to set the stories in China at first.

I suddenly had flashbacks — five years of library visits, trolling Amazon, a gazillion internet searches. I have books on horses of the world, on walled cities in China, on the Tang dynasty, the Song Dynasty. Hours and hours on the Chinese History forum. Wow, now that I’m looking at my shelf, I have books on Chinese weapons, the Art of War and other military texts, Chinese landmarks. And I consider myself a “light” researcher. Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story, I say. (I stole that from my mentor teacher, who always told me “Don’t let the truth get in the way of good teaching” when it came to science.)

Darn, it’s been a long ride. And it keeps going. I’m starting to research Taoism and demonology for my next project. No wonder historical authors want to stick to the same period for a while.

No matter how much you research an actual time, you still worldbuild around it. Or at least I do. Historians do it too. It’s the biased worldview that you start creating based on what you know. I have a loose construct of the regions of the Tang Dynasty mapped out in my head and the political structure. At some point, I have to start filling in blanks and making extrapolations of what kind of situation that would create.

Soon, you find something cool happening. You find that the history matches up with your worldbuilding as you continue to dig. There’s a certain way that empires rise and fall, I suppose. It’s all a feedback loop and, sooner or later, the stuff you’re making up isn’t so far from what could or did happen.

I’m still dreading the day someone smacks me down for gross historical inaccuracies. That’s okay. They would have had to read as much as I have to do it. Anybody that geeky deserves to wield the historical smackdown stick.