Buzzymag Interview: The Backstory of JW&TCTM

For those interested in how Jeremiah Willstone and the Clockwork Time Machine came to be, I’ve hoisted from the archives the following article from BuzzyMag where I was interviewed by Jean Marie Ward at Dragon Con 2014:

JMW: What kind of challenges are you bringing to that Steampunk story?

Dr. Anthony Francis: I was inspired to write this story by coming to Dragoncon and seeing all these people with all these gears and stuff and all the stuff on their costumes. I’m like, how would that possibly work? What if that possibly worked? Wait. Could I design a reason why people would be wearing goggles because they have ray guns that have a lot of ultraviolet? Could I design a reason why there’d be all these tubes where they maybe have gas powered things like with compressed air. So I started building this up and I started writing a small amount of story on this. I’m like, but how did they get that in the early 1900’s, slightly after what in our world would be the death of Queen Victoria? Technically Edwardian rather than Victorian, but you’ll have to read the book to see more of that. But it started to bother me. Like, how did they get in this early 1900’s time frame with all this technology that we don’t have and then it occurred to me. What if some of the scientists didn’t die, like [Riemann], and if we’d had something like modern antibiotics so he didn’t die [of, I think,] tuberculosis or pneumonia, I can’t remember which at this time. And then what if other people didn’t die? What if Mary Shelley didn’t die? I was researching feminism at the time and I had found out that there was a feminist movement in the early 1800’s that died out when Mary Wollstonecraft gave birth to Mary Shelley and died subsequent to the childbirth and then when her husband published her biography, it had the backfire effect of trashing her reputation so women’s rights were set back about a hundred years.

To learn more, go check out the interview at BuzzyMag, fellow adventurers! Or to read the book that was the ultimate product of this thought process, get Jeremiah Willstone and the Clockwork Time Machine wherever fine books are sold:

-the Centaur

Pictured: a location from Dragon Con. Or, perhaps, one from JW&TCTM … can you spot it?

A Day Without Women Would be the End of the World

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Today, March 8th is International Women’s Day, a day that began commemorating the anniversary of a women workers strike – and so perhaps it’s also being celebrated as A Day Without a Woman, another strike designed to call attention to how important women are to our society. But, science fiction writer that I am, I couldn’t help but think of literal day without women. One could think of it as an inversion of the story of Y the Last Man – except of course it would mean the end of the human world. Whether you believe the story of Genesis or the Mitochondrial Eve hypothesis, our species originated from a single mother – but new species arise when old ones go through population bottlenecks, so the children of X the Last Woman might not be a humanity that we recognize.

But, proponent of woman’s rights that I am, I can’t also help but think that science fiction scenario is precisely the wrong way to think about women. It reduces them to the role that they serve for our species. It’s no more appropriate to reduce a woman to her womb than it is to reduce a man to his sperm – and the reduction is considerably more damaging to women, who’ve suffered millennia of discrimination at the hands of societies that often treat them like second class citizens, if not property – at least since biblical and Roman times, and possibly for all of human history.

The History of International Women’s Day

Well, in the early 1900s, women who were tired of that treatment banded together into unions like the International Ladies’ Garment Worker’s Union, organizing a series of strikes demanding better conditions and equal pay, starting with one on March 8, 1908. That strike might have been overshadowed in the history books by the much larger Uprising of the 20,000 in 1909 – but the Socialist Party of America was struck enough by it to commemorate it with a Woman’s Day in 1909, which blossomed into an international celebration by 1911. In 1914, International Women’s Day was held again on March 8, and it’s been held there ever since.

Any doubters of the power of women to change the world should remember this: International Women’s Day kicked off the Russian Revolution. Leon Trotsky once said “we did not imagine that this ‘Women’s Day’ would inaugurate the revolution” – but it did, when women went on strike and took to the streets of Saint Petersburg, demanding “Bread and Peace” – an end to World War I, to food shortages, and the rule of the Russian czars – and kicking off the February Revolution. In the end, Nicholas II abdicated – and the newly instituted Provisional Government granted women the right to vote on July 20, 1917.

At first, International Women’s Day was celebrated for decades primarily in socialist countries, but as it progressed, its focus changed more and more to focus on women in general – to the point that to hide its origins, some people even made up stories that International Women’s Day had an older history going back to 1847. But it’s wrong to distort history: we should no more strip International Women’s Day of its Soviet roots than we should try to hide that Sputnik launched from Tyuratam.

Like orbit, gender equality respects no boundaries and is held back by no creed, and the United Nations began celebrating IWD as part of International Women’s Year in 1975 and giving it themes in 1996. Depressingly, many themes seem to recur, such as struggles against violence against women and struggles for gender equality – just as women marched for equality in 1908. Perhaps that’s why we needed A Day Without a Woman – to remind us of what we’d be missing in a world without them.

Whether you took part in A Day Without a Woman or are just now finding out about it, it’s a good time to think back not just on the women in your life, but to think about them not just in their roles as women – as wives or mothers or daughters or sisters – but as people who are individuals, full members of our society with equal standing with all others. That’s not to say that there’s not a lot to celebrate about women in their roles as women (or men in their roles as men, or others in their role as others) – but we should never reduce or restrict any individual to their role based on their gender.

Reflections in Victoriana

Jeremiah Willstone would be shocked to hear that in 1908 women in our universe were leading some of their first major marches for women’s rights – and not just because, in her universe, 1908 was the year Jeremiah, as a female Senior Expeditionary Commander, led a mammoth military strike force in pursuit of her uncle and his stolen airship at the beginning of The Clockwork Time Machine.

She’d be surprised because in her universe, her great-great grandmother Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a book called The Equality of Man, a magnum opus which kicked off a women’s Liberation movement that spread like wildfire all over the world – and, as I am fond of saying, “with twice as many brains working on problems, Jeremiah’s world is more advanced in 1908 than ours is today.”

In our world, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft did not write The Equality of Man; she died a decade earlier, from complications in giving birth to Mary Shelley, future author of Frankenstein. We’ll talk about how Mary Wollstonecraft’s death was a great lost opportunity – and how she inspired the world of Victoriana – in a future post!

-the Centaur

Pictured: Princess Hyacinth by Alphonse Mucha, a picture I have always admired for the strength and unconventional depicted in the figure, a daughter of a blacksmith in a ballet with ties to Czech lore. Image credit thanks to the users of Pinterest.