I am ridiculously proud of this story. Back in 2004 I heard that David Moles and Jay Lake were putting together an airship theme anthology, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories. Now, I've been an airship nut since fourth grade. I've written nonfiction articles about them for Airpower and Balloon Life magazines. So I decided that it would be morally wrong for someone to publish an airship anthology without a story by me in it. Unfortunately, I didn't have an airship story, so I sat down and wrote one.
I don't recall exactly how long it took to write "The Eckener Alternative," but it can't have been long. The deadline for submissions was close when I heard about the anthology. I think the whole thing took about a week from start to finish.
To actually create the story I had to fall back on my usual intellectual brute-force approach: what story can one tell about airships? I didn't want to do a standard-issue romance or adventure which could just as easily involve an ocean liner or a 747. The airship had to be central to the story.
Airships have become the icon for alternate history. When you look in the sky and see one, you know you're in an alternate universe. (Ken Hite has observed that according to this rule, our own history was an alternate universe from 1900-1940, and that actually explains a lot.) This meant that my story had to involve alternate history and/or time travel.
At that point I decided to get "metafictional." Any alternate history with Zeppelins tends to require an awful lot of author-fiat tinkering with the timeline. The sad truth is that airships were a practical technology for about 20 years, and hung on another 20 years mostly due to Hugo Eckener's combination of marketing genius, piloting skill, and sheer stubbornness. We modern writers create fictional worlds with airships because we like airships.
So I made that the focus of the story. The main character is John Cavalli (and no, he's not Jesus -- he's me), a trainee time traveller who starts making extracurricular trips into the past, trying to save Zeppelins as a viable form of transport. He makes increasingly drastic changes to the timeline, and finally gives Hugo Eckener a fortune in synthetic diamonds to fund a run for President of Germany in 1932. Apparently Eckener really did consider running in our history, but abandoned the idea. My time traveller shows him what will happen if he doesn't.
By averting World War II, my protagonist completely alters subsequent history, and the time travel organization he's working for ceases to exist, leaving him stuck for good in the 20th century -- but at least he's got Zeppelins.
I sent the story in and got an almost immediate acceptance. Coming on the heels of my Hellboy story, I felt absolutely bulletproof, selling everything I wrote as fast as I could put stories in the mail.
Protip for aspiring writers: when you're submitting to an original anthology, keep it short. Anthology editors want to have a lot of names on the contents page, and that's hard to manage if all the contributors want to submit 20,000-word novellas. But there's always room for a 3,000-word short-short.
Another useful tip. Remember that advice in every writing manual about "write what you know?" Well, this is a classic example. I know a lot about airship history, so I wrote a story about someone monkeying around with airship history.
The All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories anthology was extremely well-received when it came out. The caliber of stories in the book is much, much better than one would expect from a gimmicky theme anthology. I have to say that "Eckener" isn't the best story in the collection -- that's "You Could Go Home Again" by Howard Waldrop, or possibly "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes'" by Benjamin Rosenbaum.
Still, evidently other people liked "Eckener Alternative" as well. David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer selected it for Year's Best SF 10, and an audio version is due out some time soon on Escape Pod. Not bad for a story I wrote out of sheer egotism.
The spring is coming and the winter is not far behind! ^^
Posted by: MBT Shoes | 02/09/2012 at 07:11 AM
you are the first one to live deep in my heart )-(
Posted by: mbt outlet | 02/12/2012 at 10:05 PM