Big 4 with Bec: Sean McMullen

Sean McMullen’s first young adult novel was The Ancient Hero (2004), and he followed this with a teenage time travel novel, Before the Storm (2007). Sean has over a dozen YA stories published, but most of his adult novels also have a large teenage following. His 2002 novel Voyage of the Shadowmoon featured a vampire who had been a teenager for seven hundred years, and was pretty depressed about it. He currently has a novella nominated for the 2011 Hugo Award.

1. Your latest book, Changing Yesterday, is a steampunk tale set in London and Melbourne in 1901. Why steampunk, and can you give us a bit of insight into your research process?

I think of steampunk as retro science fiction, generally from the Victorian era. Steampunk does not have to include steam engines, but it so happens that some of the action in my book takes place in the passenger liner Andromeda’s engine room, beside its huge triple expansion steam engines. Barry, a boy from 1901, has stolen a deadly weapon from Liore, a cadet from the future who has traveled into the past to stop a terrible war from breaking out. Barry hopes to sell the weapon to the king and get a knighthood. As a result, there is a long and eventful chase between ships traveling from Melbourne to London, interspersed with quite a bit of romance and partying. Readers get a view of the British Empire at its height, the ships that held it together, and the distant ancestors of radio, petrol engines, and other machines that we take for granted today. It is a good way to make history interesting, because history can be interesting without wars, revolutions, genocides and atrocities.

The research was not easy, but it was fun. It was not hard to get information on the machines, but the social and human sides were a problem. Like today, technology was changing rapidly back then, as were fashions, popular music, dances, and even social attitudes. At a general level the movie Titanic gave a good overview, but the eleven years between 1901 and 1912 saw too much change, so I had to research 1901 in specific detail. I went to the State Library and read newspapers and magazines from that year, and the internet even provided motion picture footage from the opening of parliament in Melbourne. Shipboard life was the hardest to get right, yet that was central to the novel. I had to got to autobiographies to get enough detail. It may seem like a lot of trouble to go to over a novel, but this is not fantasy, so I could not just make things up.

2. Sean, as well as having sung in folk-rock band, Joe Wilson’s Mates and for the Victorian State Opera, you’ve also made early musical instruments. How does music influence your writing process and what’s on your iPod/stereo at the moment?

Music has a very big influence on me as an author. I often visualise scenes from my novels as if they were movies, with theme music in the background, and this really helps with establishing the emotional mood. In the novel I am just finishing at present, the knights take musicians along into battle. This is because the bards play instruments when singing about battles, so the knights think that real battles need music. As peculiar as it sounds, this sort of thing did happen in real life as well. The story that relied most heavily on my musical background was The Colours of the Masters, in which a woman invents a record-only sound machine around 1830, then spends about forty years secretly recording the playing of the great masters of Nineteenth Century music. Over a century after her death, a young geek with a laser pickup works out how to play her glass disks back. I’ve even done a movie script version of this story, so if this ever attracts a producer and funding, you will hear the music in my work for the first time.

Lately my stereo has been playing a lot of early Nineteenth Century music, because I am writing a novelette set in 1812, during the Napoleonic Wars. The television series Sharpe made extremely good use of military and folk music from this time, so I often have episodes of Sharpe playing to set the general mood.  If I really, really want to get in the mood, I pick up my concertina and play the tunes for myself. I know concertinas did not exist in 1812, but it’s what I happen to play.

3. You’ve been involved in medieval re-enactment societies and have actually trekked the Strezleki Desert in medieval armour ‘to get a feel for quest-style travel’ (!). What is it about this period that interests you, and how would you spend a day in medieval Europe if you had a time machine?

The medieval era was a romantic but dangerous time, and I suppose that people like it for that reason. For example, today’s sex scandals are dealt with in media interviews and confessions to Who and Hello, but back then it was trial by combat and a fight to the death. Attitudes were rather different too, so anyone tired of being politically correct today can really let themselves off the leash with a medieval story. The romance story as we know it was actually invented in the Middle Ages, around 1150. Until then, the epics were all about rather violent, upper class oafs shouting insults at each other, then fighting. After 1150  the stories included women and romance, and the hero was meant to have charm and good manners as well as fighting prowess. This was such a hit that real life medieval people started to live like the fictional characters. That’s probably the ultimate attraction of the medieval era. It’s a real-life setting based on a some very cool adventure-romances.

If I could go back to that time, it would definitely be to attend a tournament. You get to see the whole of medieval society in one place, there is dramatic action and romantic intrigue, the patron often hands out free food and drink, and there are loads of vendors, musicians, jugglers and shifty characters for background entertainment. However, I would not participate under any circumstances. The dangers of the tournament were only for trained, fit and thoroughly loopy people, but I am only trained and fit. Tournaments really were the high point of the medieval social calendar. For the participants, fortunes could be made or lost, depending on the outcome. Lives could be lost too, and they often were. As spectators, you could also see your king and queen dressed up as King Arthur and Queen Guenevere, and some of the knights fought while dressed as knights of the Round Table, devils, monsters and even monks and nuns. Medieval kings and queens dressing up as medieval kings and queens? Yes, it did happen.

4. Which of your fictional characters Burns Brightest in your mind and why?

This may come as a bit of a shock but in Changing Yesterday my favourite is a secondary character, Madeline, the Ballarat waitress who wants to run away to London to become the first female detective. True, she is a dreamer who has been reading too much Sherlock Holmes, but unlike most dreamers she has been doing the hard work to make her dream real. Her father is a policeman, so she has made the most of her background and learned about crime investigation from him. She is saving money and she is a waitress, which means she can support herself while she is setting up her detective agency in London. When Liore walks into Madeline’s coffee shop and gives her the opportunity to leave for London that very day, she takes the frighteningly hard decision to dump her secure but boring life, and run away with an appallingly dangerous stranger.

By contrast, the heroic schoolboy Daniel lets himself be swept along by circumstances, while his friend Barry is too thick to know that he is attempting the impossible by trying to meet the king. The deadly Liore does not understand fear or doubt, and is willing to sacrifice everything, including herself and her friends, to complete her mission. If I were to do a third book in the series, it would set it in London, with Madeline setting up her detective agency and Daniel and Barry helping out. In a way Madeline is a symbol of all authors. Writing is a very hard field to succeed in, the competition is fierce, and the odds are not at all good. Still, the Madelines of the world have faith in themselves, back up their dreams with hard work, and often make good.

Check out Sean’s site here!