Author Insight: Fey Oil and Phoenix Down
The idea for the story came from the 2010 Pacific Northwest Writers Conference. One of the hot topics at the conference that year was Steampunk, and I found myself getting asked by many fellow writers what it was. I answered their questions as best I could by explaining that Steampunk was a subgenre of Science Fiction and Fantasy based around social and technological themes during the Victorian era. Think of the early pioneers of Sci-Fi like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and what their vision of the future looked like with steam and clockwork mechanisms as the apex of technological advancement. Over time, the subgenre has expanded to include magic and other fanciful elements that give the writer even more freedom to experiment with a world that seems logically impossible but is nonetheless fascinating to explore.
After the writing conference I decided to write a story that would be familiar to many readers, but give it a Steampunk twist. I’ve always loved lighthouses, so much so that I have a small replica of the North Head Lighthouse on my writing desk and a photograph of the same lighthouse on a nearby wall. I was looking at both of these when I chose to write a story about a broken lighthouse on a stormy night. To make the story more fanciful, I placed the lighthouse in a mountain pass as a warning for passing dirigibles and other lighter-than-air craft. I felt the juxtaposition worked well, and in the end I feel that this story is a good introduction to both Steampunk as a subgenre as well as other Steampunk stories, including of course “The Beast Hunter” online serial also on this site.