I fell in love with steampunk machinery the same way a lot of people did:

watching Disney’s 20000 Leagues Under the Sea and admiring Harper Goff’s design for the Nautilus, so beloved by both physical and digital model makers. Steampunk fashion…doesn’t do anything special for me. For fantasy late Victorian clothing, give me Brides of Dracula instead, with a heroine who wears wholesome blues and passionate reds as well as black, a vampire who wears very little black and instead prefers blue-purple pinstripe suits and mauve capes, and a vampire hunter who favors cozy country tweeds in colors ranging from Oklahoma Clay to Ash Gray to Milk Chocolate. But really, any period film dressed by one of the great British costume firms will do (Nathan and Berman’s did Brides, if memory serves).

When I started self-publishing, I figured I would be writing steampunk sooner or later. Saving a Queen, my second book in the Ancestors of Jaiya series has a balloon in it, which makes it about as steampunk-adjacent as Georgette Heyer’s Frederica, and slightly less steampunk-adjacent than Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon. While I was writing Spider Star in 2021 and 2022, I was reading and watching a lot of Golden Age detective fiction – Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, and adaptations of the first two. One of them was the French series Agatha Christie’s Criminal Games, which we will discuss at more length in a future post.

Around this time, I started noodling around with a cluster of ideas which might, at a very abstract level, be called “feisty girl, posh guy.” (More about them in other posts.) There was an isekai version with a vaguely Victorian fantasy world, there were fantasy versions, some of them detective-oriented, others closer to Warehouse 13 (which I also watched around this timeframe), with settings ranging from faux-Victorian to faux-1920s. Then came Rings of Power Season 1. Like Wheel of Time Season 1, it tended to fill me with a feeling of “Sheesh, even I could write an epic fantasy.” Numenor was a part of the show I found interesting, and I started playing around with a setting one might call “Steampunk Atlantis” or “Steampunk Numenor” (for which, believe it or not, there is precedence in Tolkien’s early writings).

The catch is, of course, that any Atlantis story is about its highly spectacular downfall, and it was just too tragic for me to write, especially since we were (and remain) in a particularly volatile period in the history of the USA. So I asked myself, “what do the Dunedain of Arnor look like in a steampunk setting?” And the answer was: “the Victorian era monster-hunters you find in certain books and movies.”

And so I had my setting. A faux-Hapsburg Empire with an emperor elected by a council of high-ranking officials and a dynasty of in-bred, somewhat long-lived people who haven’t sat on the Imperial Throne since one of their nastier ancestors got deposed. The lost civilization, which here bears the name of Thule rather than Atlantis or Numenor, from whose fall the ancestors of the one dynasty have fled. The archaeotech those ancestors left behind, some of it not actually possible with our world’s laws of physics. The occultists in touch with the underworld, who make themselves into monstrous beings who feed on fear and pain. And the people, some of them from that dynasty, who stand between those monsters and their prey….