Brooke's blog: http://brooke-johnson.com/
Twitter: @brookenomicon
THE AWESOMENESS OF STEAMPUNK IN FILM
This might be blasphemy as a steampunk author and reader, but my favorite medium for the steampunk genre is film--hands down. There is nothing quite like seeing a beautiful mechanical sculpture come to life on the screen, whether it's the steam castle in Steamboy, or something as a close-up of the gear makeup within the Jaegers of Pacific Rim.
That ratchet and clank, the hiss of steam, the grungy aesthetic of greased up gears and tarnished boilers, paraded across the screen in gorgeous cinematic CG glory. In my opinion, nothing brings steampunk to life better than film.
But the absolute pinnacle of steampunk in film has to be the 1999 film version of Wild Wild West. That movie holds a very special place in my heart, whatever that may say about my taste in cinema.
I think that film was my first real glimpse at the steampunk genre, and I probably owe much of my fascination with the genre to it. I was ten years old when it came out and absolutely mesmerized by all the machines and inventions. And as absurd as many of the gadgets in the film are--the dead-man's-last-vision projector, the locomotive steam tank, the giant mechanical spider, the rocket-powered flying bicycle, and the mustache-twirling villain Dr. Loveless's multifunctional wheelchair--these weird and marvelous inventions embody such creativity, exploring every avenue of what if. It was that unabashed sense of "Why not?" with regard to the technology that made me love it so much. To this day, it's my favorite steampunk-inspired film (and yes, I even re-watched it recently to make sure. Its pinnacle status still stands. Haters keep hatin'. I don't care).
Other films have successfully incorporated steampunk elements as well, and many of them have offered varying levels of inspiration to my steampunk novels. The steam castle in Steamboy lends its enormous engine chamber, with its gargantuan gears and colossal pistons, to the subcity beneath Chroniker City, and the mechanical soldiers in both that film and movies like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Hellboy II, and even Sucker Punch had an impact on my automaton design in The Brass Giant, and the designs of the mechs and war machines I wrote into The Guild Conspiracy.
But Wild Wild West probably offered the most inspiration, with its widespread integration of all things mechanical into every possible gadget. It gave me the courage to delve deeper into my steampunk world, to think beyond the more obvious and exciting applications of mechanical technology and dare to build even the most mundane machine out of clockwork and steam engines.
Chroniker City has steam rickshaws instead of automobiles or carriages, automated venting systems along the city streets, a cross between a trolley and a vertical lift combined into one multidirectional mode of city transport, and a mechanical theater that employs an orchestra of musical automatons instead of musicians. These things are unimportant to the larger plot, but I feel like they bring the steampunk element to life, just as important to the steampunk aesthetic as the war machine the main character designs and builds over the course of the story.
I only hope that my words bring these machines to life with the same visual wonder and imaginative creativity as the best computer-generated graphics of the big screen. If not? Well . . . get on that, Hollywood. It's high time for a steampunk blockbuster.
You can find Brooke's novels here: https://www.amazon.com/Brooke-Johnson/e/B006OOGR9O
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