by C.A Lang-2012

Some of the blurbage for Blightcross refers to oil dependent cultures and greed. In today's climate, that's a loaded statement. But while it's true to a certain extent, it's also not the whole picture. 

Back up to the idea of writing to save the world. It's easy to fall into the trap of making this your motivation for writing. I'd say that was my mode for most of my writing years. Robert Heinlein realized this, and he wrote about it in one of his essays about writing. Basically, most of the time writing to save the world results in crappy stories. This doesn't mean you can't be critical and confrontational. That's the zone I had to navigate with this novel. Yes, it's critical and confrontational, but by no means is it a case of "tar sands bad, David Suzuki good." Part of the diesel punk idea is to align us back to the idea of progress, which has been lost thanks to this little "end of history" predicament we're in. Fossil fuels were/are, regardless of anyone’s axe-grinding on either side, an important contributor to progress. 

The attraction of technology like this, and probably nuclear science as well, is that despite how we've focused on how it goes wrong lately, it’s still crucial to our world. I know this exploration of technology has been done to death with cyberpunk, but again the hook with these "retro" genres is that we can actually relate to what's going on. These are powerful technologies that we can touch and use, rather than airy philosophical ideas that exist in some 90s concept of virtual reality and in bizarre transhumanist manifestos.

So is oil bad? Of course not. In my novel, it's fueling an entire nation that's gone insane. Are they insane because of the oil? I doubt it. The historical conditions are affecting them. The oil is just another factor. There's no denying that it's facilitating that world's progress out of a dark age ruled by which family you belonged to. There's a certain wistfulness some of the characters might show at this, and of course there are things about pre-industrial society that are things we ought to miss. That doesn't mean that moving forward is bad though. Often my favorite writers tend to show different sides and opinions. Like I mentioned, Heinlein's writing is meaningful and provocative, but it's hard to peg him in a specific political party purely by looking at his fiction. Just when you think he’s one political shade, you can read something that seems the opposite. Moorcock's Eternal Champion switches allegiances frequently as well.

This doesn't mean the author can't take a dogmatic position. But for the purposes of writing fiction, it's pretty hard to pull off giving your story a job, especially one as Sisyphean as trying to sway others politically. Very few can inject their own bitterness into their writing and still end up with a decent piece of writing. Ayn Rand comes to mind here as an example where personal dogmatic attitudes work as a selling point, but it's still a difficult read and a rare thing. It's not the easiest concept for a lot of writers to put into practice. A lot of us write because we have stuff to say. But the key is that it should be us doing the talking when we have something to say. Our characters may end up with facets of our personalities, but for myself, I know my characters do not speak for me.

C. A. Lang is a product of Nelson, British Columbia, and it shows. Growing up around Victorian architecture likely had something to do with his appreciation of steampunk, although we’re not quite sure why he felt the need to ditch the steam engines and go all internal-combustion on the genre. He has settled in Kelowna, B.C., where sometimes he can be found abusing a gigantic jazz guitar in public, hanging around certain wineries, and running obscene distances.

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