The Fall of the City of Steel

Author's Note

Writing about this book, and the long process of writing it, I wanted to state what my inspiration had been. However, it wasn't long until I realized that, like most modern works of pulp fiction, this story's intellectual ancestry is a sprawling one.

I started writing it after acquiring a taste for dieselpunk from a video game called Sine Mora. From there, all I wanted to do was write a story about a motley resistance movement, painted in the dieselpunk aesthetic.

Further in, however, my goal changed. When I began watching films about inter-war aviation, it occurred to me that, even though the city of steel would eventually constitute the closest thing this story has to a main antagonist, there was no way I could convincingly portray it as anything but utopian. A stifled, self-repressed utopia, but, to the eyes of the narrator, a utopia nonetheless.

At about the time I wrote Damon's discovery of the crimes of his city, I switched from aviation films to noir. These movies settled me into just the right headspace to explore the atrocities that always seem to lurk behind the splendor of history from the gilded age to the nuclear age.

Around the time the guerilla war began, and the story shifted focus to Joan and her women on their increasingly costly encounters with the city's military, I read various works by Edgar Rice-Borroughs. These served as less of a direct influence, but they did give better insight as to how someone from the city might think, and how they might react to Joan and the rest of the resistance. Halsey, in particular, owes a lot of his personality to the main protagonistis of Mr. Rice-Borroughs.

By the climax of this story, what few films I was watching consisted of descendents of early pulp fiction, such as Atlantis: the Lost Empire and the film adaption of John Carter of Mars.

I've used fiction from the past to help invoke the past, but I did so only to mirror the present. Even if it did so in the end, this story never existed for the purpose of indicting western civilization for century-old crimes, but to serve as a warning of what we could become again. Even with the information age keeping us communicated and informed, we have not, cannot and will not eliminate the darkest shades of our own nature. Soren is the only character who understood this, and I consider him to be the real hero of the story.