Today I am very excited to welcome Author Tony Rand Scott, author of "The Chronologies of Gyre Series - The Gregorian Part One: Industrian Revolution." SteamU Professor Rand Scott delights us with a view into his steam driven metropolis where some citizens of Gyre have suddenly been stricken with a virus called mortalism.
Today’s
Lecture by SteamU Professor: Tony Rand Scott
Author of: The
Chronologies of Gyre Series - The Gregorian Part One: Industrian Revolution
Further Discourses Available:
Office Hours:
Tony Rand Scott's Webpage
Today’s
Lectures: Spunk and Punk- The World of Gyre
My name is Tony Rand Scott, and my love of Steampunk in all its
varied forms and it was not called that then, probably started with an old TV
show called Wild, Wild, West. It seemed like a western version of James
Bond, with gadgets and such, but obviously due to the time period, did
so in a steam tech way.
World of Warcraft
Later my influences came from gaming and Anime. I
played a lot of pen and paper RPGs growing up, mostly Dungeons and Dragons and Call
of Cthullhu, both which tended to have Steampunk elements to them, at
least with a majority of the game masters I played with. Steam technology has
always seemed to go hand in hand with fantasy settings, Warhammer and World
of Warcaft as two more modern examples, which brings me to my other
notable influence. I have always been addicted to Japanese culture, either in
games or anime, and both have influence me in a nontraditional way with
Steampunk. Dark dystopian cities and worlds of Final Fantasy and even The
legend of Zelda series to a degree, part magic and part technology,
many times steam technology, are a staple of both mediums and I have loved them
since I was young. More recent movies such as Princess Mononoke and Howl’s
Moving Castle have continued this trend.
Van Helsing
Though seeming to be the
figurehead of the movement, the Victorian age Steampunk has also fascinated me
from its integration into cult favorites like Dr. Who, movies like League
of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Hellboy, Van Helsing, Sherlock
Holmes, Hansel and Gretel Witch Hunters. Recent games like Dishonored,
the Bioshock
series and even aspects of Skyrim show how Steampunk can be
mutable and integrated into almost any setting. I especially love how they have
almost created their own Steampunk offshoot with the BioShock series. (and in
fact I believe I actually saw a mention of a Bio-punk panel at a Con.) All these influences have warped my
imagination and created the hodgepodge monstrosity that is my version of
Steampunk.
Industrian Revolution, the first book in my series, is a
Steampunk novel, though not in the traditional sense. It does contain steam powered
robots and machinery, but initially lacks the Victorian trappings that are
normally associated with Steampunk. There is an endgame that carries the story
to a traditional Steampunk world, where steam powered machines and humans
coexist, in a Victorian style setting. The story just has to get there through
the progression I have envisioned.
LXG, Nemo's Car
The basic premise of the story is that Gyre, a world that is a
giant steam driven metropolis constructed as a vast gear, is the caretaker of
all the human worlds. They are programmed to introduce technology to the human
worlds, and also to monitor and incrementally advance it in conjunction with
the planets evolution, without human contact or revealing their presence.
Eventually, there was a backwash effect that was unexpected, the
human influence on the citizens of Gyre. As the Gyrelins began demonstrating an
increasingly humanized behavior, which is considered a disease or “virus” and
labeled “mortalism”, the governing council created a system to minimize the
corruption by restricting it to a small group. They created a figurehead
position of rule and regulated the majority of human observation to them, so
they could terminate them when the corruption became intolerable. When that
didn’t work, they created their own agent, to work outside the authority of
their figurehead ruler. This creates the main conflict of the story, a ruler,
in this case the Gregorian of the title, and his small retinue who work to
contact and interact with the humans, versus a machine government and its
psychotic agent, who will stop at nothing to purge mortalism from Gyre, even if
it means breaking their own laws and destroying humanity completely.
The plot revolves around the method of termination, or term
limits, that the Gyrelin government has instituted, called the Renaisséance.
The
process of Renaisséance involves destroying the ruler, keeping only his or her
databank to review on how they were corrupted by humanity, so they can hopefully
prevent it from happening. This is an example where I mixed two words to
represent opposing ideas for an action, but also to demonstrate how human ideas
and history have affected Gyre. In Gyre, they have no concept of what a
renaissance or a séance is, but the word embodies the government’s hope of a
rebirth or resurgence of the restrictive values they were created to uphold. It
melds it with séance, to represent the reality of their actions, that they have
abandoned looking towards the future, and are trapped in the past, reviewing
dead robot data cards like Tarot , looking for salvation by fixating on the
sins.
One of the themes of the story is a counterpoint to humanity’s
ever-increasing obsession with technology, by telling a story about robots that
wanted to be more human. Though it is not politically motivated, I have
included some elements alluding to issues of sexuality, race, economic issues
and other current themes. It didn’t start out that way, there were just some
inherent similarities when I was coming up with the lore, history, and society
of Gyre that mirrored some present day issues, so I put a few Easter eggs in
the writings. Some references are more obvious than others.
I plan on several series of trilogies that in some way will be
named for the current ruler, The Gregorian being the current obviously, named
for either famous rulers and /or ages to include The Hellenic, Georgian,
Edwardian and of course The Victorian. Most of the naming conventions are just
to show how little bits of humanity have slipped into the Gyrelin robot
mindset, and to add a little familiarity for the readers. They also may be
subtle hints at plot lines etc.
One of the central characters, modeled from the core Machiavellian
principle of the ends justify the means, is the Mechiavellian. He is the
principle agent of The Gregorian, and he who interacts with humanity the
most. He has his own secrets and
motivations that even The Gregorian is unaware of, and this will play out over
several books.
All of
the worlds featured in the books deal with an overlying theme. Lawless Mesa is
the only mentioned world in The Chronologies of Gyre: The Gregorian part one
Industrian Revolution, and deals with issues of the environment. Lawless Mesa
is a vast desert planet, almost entirely covered with giant mesas. The ancient Lawless
Mesan seas were polluted with evolutionary accelerants and seeded with a mass
overpopulation of aggressive alien life forms, which proceeded over hundreds of
years, to kill one another off. The purpose of this was to turn the seas into
visceral cesspools of effluence, then The Gyrelins induced cataclysmic
earthquakes to drain the seas into the earth so they could become fossil fuels.
Obviously, I took a few liberties with how oil deposits are created, but I
needed it to fit into the storyline and theme. Some life survived the
cataclysmic earthquakes and the sea, humans and other creatures managed to
thrive in secret in subterranean forests. The planet was abandoned for
thousands of years until the fossil fuels could develop, with only a small
group of Gyrelins left behind as caretakers. The main story arc of lawless Mesa
deals with the interactions between the Gyrelin caretakers, their eventual discovery
of human civilization and Mechiavellian’s machinations with both sides.
This concludes the quick peek into my imagination, as expressed
in my writings. I hope you enjoyed it, and hope you read my series. Thank you.
Tony Rand Scott
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