So there we were at O’Hara’s Pub, talking about something vital, with a fresh bowl of popcorn, a pitcher of beer, and an empty afternoon before us…. (And just as none of us knew that we were about to write the first “Steampunk” stories and spawn a literary movement, none of us knew that we were rapidly using up our cardboard carton full of empty afternoons. These thirty years later I can see the looming shadow of empty afternoons in my future again, but of a decidedly different sort.) K.W. rolled his eyes at something I’d said (something involving “science”) and suggested that given my curious notions of that subject I’d be likely to write a story in which someone plugged a black hole with a Fitzall Sizes cork. After a momentary silence I asked him whether, with all due respect, he was willing to let me have that idea or whether he wanted it for himself. He said I was welcome to it, and I went home and wrote “The Hole in Space” and sent it off to Starwind magazine, which closed its doors a week after accepting the story and mailing me the forty dollar check. I never sent the story back out, and it languished in the drawer for over 25 years before it saw daylight again. But it was writing that second St. Ives story that somehow made it inevitable that I write more. A conversation at Roy Squires’s house in Glendale (as well as a bottle of Laphroaig scotch) inspired “The Idol’s Eye,” and an article in the Los Angeles Times about a local comet chaser gave rise to a lengthy, unpublished, plotless story that turned out to be notes for Homunculus. “The Ape-box Affair” was also the result of my love of Robert Louis Stevenson’s work (something that still hasn’t worn off) and you can find its beginnings and the beginnings of Homunculus in Stevenson’s The Wrong Box and in the stories that make up New Arabian Nights. Langdon St. Ives’s last name came from the Stevenson’s St. Ives, although it was perhaps the only Stevenson novel that I hadn’t read and still haven’t. (I don’t know whether the “St. Ives” of the novel is a person or is the place that the man in the rhyme was going to. One of these days I’ll read the book and find out.) Langdon St. Ives, by the way, is a distant forebear of Edward St. Ives, who would make his appearance years later in The Digging Leviathan, which was the novel that Sanctity of Moontide turned into once I got rid of Proust and Sterne and figured out how to write it.
Meanwhile, K.W. and Tim Powers contracted with Roger Elwood to write books in a series that would involve the reincarnation of King Arthur throughout history. The series was scrapped before their novels were published. (I submitted a proposal for a novel involving a plot against George III involving poisoned snuff and William Blake, not knowing that Ray Nelson was already writing Blake’s Progress, the first book in the series. Elwood sent me a rejection letter complaining that I was apparently making a mockery of his project. I wasn’t, actually, and I remember wondering whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that my writing seemed so effortlessly to make mockeries of things. It wouldn’t, alas, be the last time the problem surfaced.) At about that time K.W. met Elwood in Los Angeles to discuss the project, and when the waiter took their drink order, Elwood asked for a “Vanilla 500.” K.W. said he’d have the same. The drink turned out to be milk on the rocks, which, K.W. told us at O’Hara’s later that same afternoon, contained neither vanilla nor 500. K.W.’s Arthurian novel, Morlock Night, was published by Daw, and Tim’s novel, The Drawing of the Dark, was published by Del Rey. The Drawing of the Dark wasn’t Steampunk in its setting, but it was Steampunk in spirit, and of course it would be followed up with The Anubis Gates, which is arguably the best novel of the genre.
Late in the 1990’s I received a letter from the University of Bologna inviting me to speak at a conference that was to be put on by the Department of Utopian and Dystopian Studies. The subject of the conference was Steampunk, and there was to be a day (out of three) dedicated to my work with me as keynote speaker. My Italian publisher, Mondadori, would host a party. I’d be the talk of the town. I was pleasantly bowled over. I imagined Umberto Eco reading Homunculus with his eyes bulging out — perhaps the scene in which Dr. Narbondo (a name I had borrowed from Borges) tries to animate the skeleton of Joanna Southcote with a bladder full of chemical gas. Eco, of course, would see immediately that the episode was not only a subtle nod to Borges, but to Flaubert, also — to Madame Bovary’s lengthy and fairly hilarious death scene. With tears in his eyes he’d wave me onto the stage: thunderous applause, chants from the audience of “Steampunk! Steampunk!” (rendered into Italian).
Unfortunately the University could only offer me several million lire to pay for the trip, which turned out to be about thirty dollars, give or take fifty cents. I couldn’t afford to go, which was just as well, because my memory of Umberto Eco goggling over my books, by then fixed in my mind, has remained unsullied all these years since. Certainly that was the best conference I never attended. It was also my first inkling that Steampunk was “big in Europe” and apparently still is.
Lord Kelvin’s Machine is my most recent effort (although ideally not my final effort) to write out another episode in the life of Langdon St. Ives. It’s hard to believe that I wrote that book fifteen years ago, a time of great change in my own life. As ever, I didn’t foresee the change or perceive it occurring (although I can see its shadow in the novel, now that I reread it). Coming to understand change is always a matter of looking back, which is just what I’ve been doing in this afterword, with no other motive, really, aside from nostalgia.
Jim Blaylock
Orange, California
December 10, 2007