stevenpiziks | The Doomsday Vault Redux (Reply)

In celebration of Open Road Media offering new versions of some of my books, I'm blogging about the history of these novels and how I came to write them. A trip down memory lane!

(You can find the books here: https://openroadmedia.com/search-results/books/steven%20harper Buy a few copies for the kids!)

For months I'd been toying with the idea of writing a steampunk novel. I'd already done a couple-three steampunk short stories, and found I liked the genre very much. But I needed characters. A world. A story. So I set about to make them ... by asking myself questions.

There are generally two ways to start a science fiction or fantasy novel. You can start by building the wider world and deciding how the magic/science affects the world and the people in it, then narrowing the view down to one person and his or her place in this world. Or you can start with a person and slowly widening your view to the surrounding world, building the setting around the character. I always respond best to people rather than their surroundings, so I almost always start from the character and build outward. And so I set out to make some people in a so-far undefined steampunk setting.

Alice came to me as a young Englishwoman who owned a windup cat and one good dress. This is where the questions began. Why did she only have one good dress? What would she use it for? Where did her windup cat come from? I answered my own questions, and Alice took shape in my mind.

I also knew I wanted two protagonists who would eventually form a romantic relationship, and I wanted a male who was very different from Alice, so I deliberately ran in the opposite direction to create Gavin. He was younger, barely eighteen, and unlike ladylike Alice, he lived a life of travel and adventure on a small dirigible, and he played the fiddle. But where did Gavin himself come from? How did he get on the airship in the first place? Why does he play the fiddle? I answered those questions, too.

Every protagonist needs an outrageous best friend, so I created Louisa to be Alice's. Louisa was great fun to write ("Puff up your chest, dear—here he comes with the petit fours!"), and as a result she ended up playing a much bigger role in the book than I'd originally intended.

And we need an antagonist. My favorite kind of antagonist is one who is (rightly) convinced that she's doing the right thing, and the protagonists are terrible people who need to be stopped. Out of this, I got Lieutenant Susan Phipps, who is probably my favorite antagonist of all time. Don't tell my other bad guys!

Then I needed to build outward and create my world. I wanted zombies in my world because ... zombies! I wanted mad scientists who created impossible inventions out of brass and steel and steam. But how did these things come exist? Why can the inventions defy known physics? What do you do with inventions that could potentially destroy the world?

You put them in the Doomsday Vault, of course.

The Doomsday Vault Redux

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