Welcome back to another blog hop, with #OpenBook. Here’s this week’s prompt.
Don’t forget to click the link to see what everyone else has to say on this week’s subject. It’s at the end of my post.
What person/place/thing did you enjoy researching the most?
I had a real choice when it came to this post. I’ve loved all the worlds that I’ve created, from the far future galactic civilisations to the space station off Saturn, just a few years from now. And I’ve grown fond of the characters that inhabit them, together with the technology that’s a huge part of their lives.
It’s all been fun to imagine and develop, but there was another place that I found to be the most enjoyable of all to create and populate.
That’s my Steampunk world of Norlandia.
Its starting point is loosely based on the world of around 1850. At that time, in our world, electricity was a novelty with few practical applications, crude oil was still seen as a medicine, and society ran on whale oil, coal or water power.
All I had to do was look at a different way that society might have developed, if vested interests had suppressed such new-fangled inventions to maintain their own grip on the levers of power.
To my surprise, when I looked at how the things we have today might have been achieved by other means, I found that there wasn’t much that couldn’t be done. Jet engines, clockwork-powered vehicles, pneumatic robots and even submarines are all possible. And never forget that the first computer didn’t need electricity to function.
There are new branches of science that have emerged in my alternative universe, along with advances in medicine and unexpected social differences.
All exciting stuff to invent and refine.
It’s all a question of thinking around corners, breaking society down and reassembling it.
By making sure that everything has a purpose and can be seen as a natural product of progress, the new world can be brought to life.
And that’s almost as much fun as actually writing the story, and finding a use for all the new stuff you’ve invented.
Taking a society and imagining how it might evolve gives you the chance to explore the things that we don’t have here, but would be really cool if we did. And to imagine how new discoveries and inventions might affect the world you’ve built.
Then you have to inhabit it with people like the Victorians, inventive, determined and with language and a moral code to match.
And that’s another enjoyable part of the process.
What do you think about this week’s subject?
Let me know by leaving me a comment.
While you’re here, please click the InLinkz link to check out what my fellow writers have to say about this week’s topic.
I’ll be back with another post on Thursday, see you then. Meanwhile, have a great week.
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