Free from duty for a few moments, I made my way from the mess to the cargo hold. At the moment, crates and boxes stacked higher than the top of my head filled it with only a meandering path left between them. I dropped into the hold, fully prepared to lose myself in the maze.
“Hold it right there.” The voice was far too deep to belong to one of the lolitas.
Keeping one hand on the ladder, I turned slowly and stared past the barrel of the gun pointed my way to the man behind it. He was young and quite handsome with his shadowed eyes and chiseled jaw. The badge pinned to his chest, however, gave me pause.
“Who are you?”
“I’m in charge down here, and if you have concerns about that, feel free to haul yourself back up to the bridge and ask your captain.” He didn’t drop the weapon, but he did step back, allowing me room.
Now I remembered that the captain had mentioned a passenger traveling with our cargo. If I’d known he was a lawman, I would have avoided the hold like the plague. Time for a hasty retreat to anywhere else. “I only came down to lose myself in the boxes for a bit. The hold has never been this full, and I couldn’t resist the lure of a few moments alone.”
He lowered the weapon at last and scrubbed at his jaw. “Apologies, miss, but I can’t allow that. This crap is intel destined for the task force that’s–”
“It’s what for what?” I blinked at him, his words nothing but gibberish. “No. Never mind. I should return to my duties. Good day, sir.” I raced up the ladder and back to my station where things made some small degree of sense.
A couple days ago I finished up line edits on Clockwork Mafia. It was a huge reminder of the fact that research doesn’t end with facts and dates and names. The number of anachronistic words and phrases that had slipped into my narrative was… Well, let’s just say I became paranoid on my read-through that there were more.
In many ways, steampunk is anachronistic–modern technology and attitudes shoved into an older society. But that doesn’t mean that anything and everything goes. For instance, there is a flamethrower in Clockwork Mafia and, while I don’t think its existence is a problem (even though in our world they weren’t used until WWI), I did change an instance of the point-of-view character thinking of it as a flamethrower. (The totality of that part in the scene is more complicated than that, but it was adjusted more than once to correct reality with Badlands-reality.)
There were a few of those instances where the real-world use of a word or phrase wasn’t that far removed (in time) from the events in Clockwork Mafia, but they were changed in order to keep as much of my alternate reality consistent with the known world as possible. It does, however, beg the question of how much leeway do readers allow for such things. The mob was not known as “the mob” until prohibition era. In a story about pre-prohibition mafia in an alternate reality, would that bother you as a reader? Task force didn’t come into use until WWII. So, where is the line drawn?
(Note: This is in no way a negative comment on my editor. I changed all the anachronistic words and phrases because I want my reality to be as realistic as possible. It just made me very curious how others felt about such things in general.)
This is why I avoid historical – SO not my forte!
*hugs* But you are brilliant, so I’m sure you could write anything 😉
I suppose if I knew the difference it might bother me as a reader, but I am glad to know that both you and your editor are trying to make it as realistic as possible.
(And… Is that a scene from CM??)
LOL no, it isn’t. I do little scenelets at the beginnings of my posts here at Steamed to set up the post. Just something a little different. 😉
And I HOPE we caught them all.
I was attracted to steampunk because I did my grad work in the Victorian novel, so I am more sensitive to it than the average reader and anachronisms can definitely take me right out of things. I’ve actually wondered about hiring myself out in the steampunk community as a Vic!checker for authors who’d like an expert eye; I wonder if there’d be a market for that?
I’m not sure if there would be or not. The idea has potential though. Hmmmm…
Well…in the worlds I create, I embrace anachranisms and set things up to deliberately expose them… But I do think that is rare. 😉
Agreed. Your stuff is brilliant for the way you work those things in. 🙂
I’ve had this come up too. It’s a dilemma each and every time. I can have robot dogs but not fire escapes at a hotel? (Yes, that was a real instance.) I think you just have to do whichever works best for your world. Good going on getting the edits done. 🙂
As a writer of modern gothic fiction I can only say I hugely admire your dedication to realism. I’m just in the editing phase for one of my stories and the idea of having to make it relatively historically accurate to a past era would terrify me. Isn’t it hard enough remembering the idioms in each character’s language, or what happened in a conversation eighty pages ago. Eeek!
Honestly, it was embarrassing how many slipped through because my mind doesn’t automatically think about whether or not a word or phrase is “old enough.” Once my editor called me on a couple I hit panic mode though and started checking everything that seemed even a little questionable. My history teachers are probably quietly laughing at me now since that was always the subject in school I cared least about.
Well, if you leave any in you can say you did it on purpose because history is just a reconstruction of past events based on a limited amount of evidence… or something similar…