Well, I mean, it’s a story over 50,000 words.

That’s not a novel — I just wrote over 42K words on a handful of Firefox extensions to enhance privacy!

You need to do a Tolkien or Stephen Donaldson … or, Oh, God, Anne McAffrey .. and write interminable numbers of ‘books’ for it to be a novel — pull your finger out!

There’s even a sub plot in it.

A whole subplot?

How will I cope with the complexity?

Have you read Terry Pratchett? He knew how to write subplots!

The Dutch expression is “ver van mijn bed show”.

Which means?

The SARS epidemic just didn’t reach me, as such, while I knew about it, kept an eye on it and all that, just didn’t impact my perception of the world much. I didn’t even know how little it impacted me until recently. Like I said, naive and ignorant.

Oh, I didn’t really pay any more attention to it than you — it wasn’t happening here after all. I was just aware it had happened and, some time later, noticed that people were still wearing masks long after it was over.

Isn’t anything-punk by definition unconcerned with things like trends and shelf-lives?

You should know better than to try to delineate what Punk may or may not concern itself with. The whole point of Punk was a rejection of trends¹ and an observation of things (most especially their Future) having so a short shelf-life that it was over before it began. Listen to the early post-Punk electro-/synth- pop like Gary Numan or … most apposite in this instance, the Buggles’ Living in the Plastic Age … which is about as proto-cyberpunk as you’ll find in its concern about sociotechnological trends.

I have, actually. Problem is, that will require oil. I mean I can use handwavium as the fuel source for my society and make dieselpunk work in a way. But my relatively small, contained and isolated society lives underground and fears topside. They have mines. Mines leads me to coal. Coal leads to steam-engine levels of technology.

So … let me get this straight.

Your story is set underground … where oil comes from.

And you can’t think of a way to rationalise its presence as fuel.

Oooookaaaaay.

Are you sure you’ve thought this through?

Speaking of handwavium … steam is literally just hot air — the water is only necessary because it superheats compared to just air, meaning there is greater energy available (think about how you scald yourself much worse by putting your hand over the spout than simply putting your hand on the hot kettle).

There’s no reason why your society should not have developed very clever ways to redirect airflow (down increasingly narrow pipes and vents) in the same manner as the Romans (and, later,Victorians) used gravity to make their sewers flow.

Oh don’t worry. It will be dwarfpunk, not elfpunk.

Good luck crossing that ocean in the next two months or so.

I can wait.

Besides … two months is hardly an insurmountable barrier, is it? Christmas is further off.

I did take a little bit of inspiration from a game; Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. It was the first RPG I played, being more of a RTS/management kind of gamer. The concept is fascinating to me. In game, you have an aptitude meter. The more you lean towards technology the more magic will malfunction or have no effect. If you lean more towards magic, technology will malfunction or have no effect. As someone who has had the frustration of seeing IT-guys doing the exact same thing I just did, and somehow it works for them but not for me, I know I can write a dynamic like that.

I’d write it off as a tired idea that really needs to be put out of its misery … it’s been molested by many a necrophiliac since it was first conceived — nearly as tedious, in fact, as the whole ‘Order versus Chaos’ trope (order is merely a subset of chaos, entropy rules, NEEEEEEEXT!!!)

But … okay … there is that whole “But I just did that” thing about computers, it’s true. And, after the amount of time I’ve spent using and abusing them, fixing them until they break, I have to admit that it must seem like magic, if you don’t know what I do … and I really couldn’t explain it to you because it took me thirty years of wide-ranging study and hands-on experience to reach that level of being able to pinpoint the cause of, and solution to, a problem by … ‘intuition’ isn’t the word, it’s more an educated guess that is 80% likely to be right first time … and neither of us have that long for you to catch up, so, trust me, you didn’t do the thing I did, you did something like it … or you didn’t do the other things I did before I did it, because you didn’t know to try them (and, therefore, didn’t notice me do them when I did either, because you didn’t know to look and, as a result, didn’t know what you were seeing when I did).

But I think you’d be better off with a Warhammer 40K style ‘arcane lore’ approach than a strict ‘elemental’ antagonism: it takes aptitude to succeed at either … and they each require so much study and practice that you can’t master both of them unless you’re an exceptional polymath — it leads to the same result without the tedium of re-treading the dead ground of 1970s science fantasy.

But there’s not going to be orcs and trolls and fairies

I prefer orcs myself — they much less tediously goodie-goodie and twee than either elves or dwarfs … decidedly the most colourful of the WH40K species/races.

Even fairies with steam-powered muskets would be different at least.

(or cybernetics).

Thank Heaven for small mercies — and I’m not being sarcastic: even during the heyday of cyberpunk, I was much more interested in the potential of a biopunk (and not altogether far off the mark either, by the looks of things).

Although … Tinkerbell on the warpath because her a cyberoptics are on the fritz and she needs to hunt down the dwarf/troll/whoever that ripped her off could be … again … interestingly different.

Just one group of people living underground who have technology and one group of people living above ground who have magic.

Hmmmm …

Couldn’t you have a more … I dunno … ‘multicultural’ … setting with all the complexity that entails? It’d lend itself to more complex developments, with people’s agendas at risk of discovery rather than the straight ‘enemy at the gates’ kind of thing.

I mean, it’s your story and I don’t know what’s gonna happen in it, but I think you should try to steer away from ideas that can be told with a single ‘meme’.

Le Guin et al got away with it when they did because the World was a different place then, but people’s sense of disbelief will be stretched in a world that isn’t divided by an ‘iron’ curtain any more and never has been in their lifetime.

That’s alright then. Air quality is actually a big issue in my story. To the point that it is negatively affecting fertility of the underground colony. (I know. I’m stealing from lots of sources.)

See my comments above about handwavium.

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¹ “And now … more of the same” — Blank Reg, Max Headroom.