The Phantom Empire, starring Gene Autry, is a matinee serial that is part musical, part western and part sci-fi adventure. It’s not really very good at being any one of those things, but when I was a kid, it taught me that genre was more of a guideline than an actual rule. That was reinforced by some of the Hindi and Tamil movies I explored as an adult. The musical counterterrorist thriller/romcom Thuppaki, and its Bollywood version Holiday, are good examples of mashups that worked for their target audiences.
At any rate, the main image I retained from The Phantom Empire was of an arrogant woman lording it over an underground city. I made at least one attempt to write my own version of it in middle school. Life went on. I read H. Rider Haggard’s She, and decided the only characters I liked were the narrator/supporting character Horace Holly and Ustane, another supporting character who gets killed because Ayesha (the title character) sees her as competition for the love of boring himbo Leo Vincey.
Haggard wanted people to see Leo as a heroic figure and Ayesha as a tragic anti-heroine destined to be purified (in the sequel) by reincarnation and vaguer forms of woo-woo. He devoted a whole paragraph of his foreword to shooting down Holly/Ayesha shippers, which tells you something about the feedback he was getting before publication. For my part, I mostly felt that Ayesha was a villainess, and Holly was the real hero of the piece, and the Ursula Andress film version from the mid-sixties appealed to me because it…kind of almost looked like the makers agreed with me? At least on Ayesha’s villainy, anyway.
Sometime in the 00s, when I was making my first fumbling attempts to write actual novels, I brainstormed an idea I called The Phantom Queen. It went through a few variations, including a post-apocalyptic western about a couple of roving cowboy troubadours broadcasting from the wasteland, but the gist of it was always the same. The young, dashing man who turns out to be an empty suit; his wiser and kinder mentor; the glamorously evil Queen of a subterranean city; the well-meaning woman forced to serve her and destined to fall for the mentor. I didn’t write it at that time, and it eventually faded to the background.
Then, sometime in the middle of writing Undead Flight, the idea returned to me as a kind of backstory for Maxim os Storm’s parents. The steampunky Drill and the dragon wandered in as well at that point, possibly inspired by the film version of At The Earth’s Core. (No, they don’t call it a dragon in that movie, but as of the point you have a giant fire-breathing lizard that dies to an arrow-shot ala Smaug, it’s a distinction without a difference.)
Some more references to the evil Queen emerged over the course of writing Dragon’s Teeth. By the time I was done with that one, I had a pretty fair idea of what my next book in that setting was going to be. Phantom Queen is a prequel. Maxim’s parents, his uncles, and the underground city where a glamorous woman has been ruling longer than for thousands of years. It is gaslamp fantasy with a Drill, a dragon, and a slow-burn romance. There is no explicit content, and there is plenty of drama.
It comes out on the 16th and is available to preorder now.
If you are new to the series, I would read it fourth. I explain why here.
