It’s not
really
an alternate history. It’s a
contrafactual universe, which is a bit different in a technical sense–an
alternate history takes place in a universe that’s just like ours, except some
thing
turned out differently. In a contrafactual universe, the physical laws are
different.

Generally speaking, contrafactual universes are classed
as fantasy and alt-hist is classed as SF, but honestly, there’s a good deal of
handwaving in either. For example, you might try to write a rigorous alternate
history, but this thing happens as soon as you start changing, where even the
language and the people change. If there’s no American revolution, for example,
a whole bunch of things change, and the same people are not important, only in
different roles, a hundred years on. but of course one of the conceits of
alternate history seems to be that you can take the same historical people and
do ahistorical things with them.

Unfortunately, a moment’s thought would show you why
that wouldn’t work. Change one border, and you start a butterfly cascade
effect: people just don’t get born. Different people get born. Kill somebody in
a war, and so on…

On the other hand, it’s a heck of a lot of fun to take,
say, Marie Curie and stick her in an entirely different setting. Fun for writer
and fun for reader: it’s a thought experiment. So, we are engaged in a
collective suspension of disbelief to get her there.

This is why I think that the pretense that alt-hist is
somehow “rigorous” is a little disingenuous.

So, anyway. New Amsterdam in contrafactual. The laws of
physics are entirely different. Magic works, in certain limited ways–it’s
a system of magic that Sir Isaac Newton would have been completely comfortable
with, I suspect, codified and dare I say scientific.

As a result of this, I arbitrarily decided that certain
things would be different–that the Native peoples of North America would
have been able to fight European settlement to a standstill, for example,
because Mayan and Iroquois alliances proved too powerful for the colonists.

Therefore, the European settlements are limited to
narrow bands along the coasts. Also, the Dutch retained possession of New
Holland–our New York State–until the equivalent of the Napoleonic
wars, at which point they ceded it to England to avoid French conquest. Now, of
course, I’ve admitted above that I am just making this stuff up. But I did try
to make it logically consistent.

All fiction is a tissue of lies, of course. It’s just
even more evident to me when writing alternate history or contrafactual history
than elsewhere.

Q: What’s your favorite thing about writing in that
world?

EB:
Oh, the ability to play. I can put
vampires and sorcerers and ghosts into a society that codifies everything in
rigorous and even closed-minded hierarchies, and watch the sparks fly. because
of course one of the things vampires and sorcerers and
ghosts–thematically–are about is overturning hierarchies. So I have
these characters who are, by their very existence, an overthrow–a
downfall–of the stratified society and scientific method… and they are
engaged in using rigorous methods–forensics, deductive logic–to
reinforce that

society.

It’s
so
much fun.

Q: What are the influences on
New Amsterdam
, and
what drew you to them? What made you decide to combine them?

EB:
Well, of course, there’s a basic
debt owed to the work of Randall Garrett, the Lord Darcy mysteries. Which I
have long loved, and my protagonist, Detective Crown Investigator Abigail Irene
Garrett, is named for him. I had some reactions to the unexamined class issues
in those, and some of what I was writing about grew out of that. I’m also
incredibly fond of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries, and I tried
to borrow some of the air of those. Abby Irene is Irene because of Irene Adler.

And then there’s Sebastien, the Great Detective. Who
also happens to be a wampyr. The classic Victorian monster, as recollected for
us by Bram Stoker. Sebastien is not a particularly Dracula-esque wampyr,
however. Once I had the forensic detective story, and the Victorian setting, he
was a natural as an additional character.

They seemed, in other words, to go well together.

And in addition, because I had this scientific magic
system in place, I could bring in all sorts of steampunk elements. Dirigibles,
for example. Any excuse for dirigibles is a good excuse, I think.

Q: The Promethean Age books are secret history rather
than alternate history, and they’re also quite diverse. What is it that unifies
them (conceit, theme, etc.)?

EB:
Oh, yes. I have five of these
written and four of them sold. One’s in print, one more is coming out this
summer, and then the next two in 2008 and 2009. And then, like Frodo and
Samwise, we shall see.

Tim Powers talks about the research that you do for
secret-historical fantasy, and how as you start uncovering all these odd
connections, your brain starts telling you, “Oh, wow, I’m not making any of
this up.” And it’s true: the brain is a pattern-sensing machine. A pattern-
manufacturing
machine. It makes you understand how conspiracy buffs get that way: there’s a
tremendous satisfaction, a dopamine rush, in that kind of problem solving. I
suspect it’s the same satisfaction one gets from reading a good
whodunit–the aha! function–or solving a tricky math problem. The
brain rewards us for mastering new ideas, because it’s adaptive to do so.

I don’t know if there’s a unifying theme in the series,
beyond the unifying theme in all of my work, the ur-story, which seems to be
something along the lines of “you’re not dead until you stop kicking, dammit.”

The conceit of the series is that “all stories are
true,” that narratives, in other words, have an objective reality. And that
they are influenced by the way they are told, and how often they are repeated.
The overarching conflict of the Promethean Age books deals with a conflict
between the Prometheus Club, an organization of mages who are devoted to
protecting human society from things that go bump in the night… and the things
that go bump in the night.

Each book or pair of books (there’s one duology) stands
alone, completing a portion of narrative. And each one is told from different
perspectives, and at different places in history. Some are modern, some are
historical. Some are from the point of view of the Faeries and other
“otherwise” creatures, and some are from the point of view of the humans of the
so-called Iron World.

Behind it all is the idea that, like most conflicts,
nobody really knows how it originated or who the good guys or bad guys are.
Both sides are at fault.

Some readers love this aspect. Some find it a little
difficult to divorce themselves from anthropocentric thinking, and firmly take
sides with humans. Some… are definitely not on our side.

I find that fascinating.

They’re meant to be pretty good adventures, too, and
hopefully full of cool bits–dragons and Magi and warrior queens and
Mythical Las Vegas and transformations and hopeless love and death-or-glory
stands and betrayals and swordfights and abductions. If I do say so myself.

Q: Las Vegas. Five minutes. Go.

EB:
You know, I lived there for seven
years, and I’m still not sure what I think of the place. For a city that’s only
a hundred years old, it has a rich vein of mythology and a hammerlock on a
certain archetype in world consciousness, right now. Sin City, the beating
heart of American capitalism and kitsch.

But you know, a lot of people live there. And it’s hard
for many of them to imagine a future outside of Las Vegas. It’s a city-state,
in a lot of ways, very isolated–there’s desert on all four sides, after
all–and so it develops a particular culture all its own.

I had a very hard time living there. The climate was not
comfortable for me, I ran across a lot of social assumptions that made me very
unhappy, and my employment and personal situation frankly sucked. Now that I’m
away from it, I have a better grasp on some of its good qualities, but while I
was living there, I felt trapped.

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