Writing in a Victorian SF style

One of the chief difficulties for me in writing "The Star Travels of Dr. Jeremiah Fothering-Smythe" is not the deadlines (a 20,000 word novella every month), coming up with ideas and so forth.  No.  The problem is the juggling act of tone.

You see, I want it to feel like a genuine Victorian/Edwardian sci-fi story.  And yet, I also want that thrilling edge of later pulp works like Flash Gordon (the strip or the serials).  And also, I want it to actually be enjoyable to a modern audience who may not be familiar with the classics, might not (yet) understand the conventions.  (They can learn that as we go, but if they are going to stay for the ride it has to appeal to them off the bat.)

The conventions of early pulp SF are varied, but for my purposes there is one thing that I am mostly talking about.  I'm talking about the protagonist as explorer.  About the focus not on his personal adventure, but on the things, events, and cultures that he witnesses.

Take a look at HG Wells' (rightfully) famous work "The Time Machine".  Spoilers ahoy, but the plot is essentially this:  the (unnamed) time traveler goes forward to Earth's far future.  He encounters some friendly little guys and hangs around them for a while doing nothing.  Soon he decides to check out what's underneath the city, but immediately doesn't like the vicious guys he sees there so quickly goes back up top.  Later, he journeys to a far building with one of the nice guys in tow, gets threatened by another of the bad creatures, and decides it's time to go home.  The end.

Almost nothing happens in this book.  There are almost no events in it.  No incident.  Not even any real character development.  The time traveler doesn't get a name.  He doesn't get too affected by the things he's seeing or getting caught up in - besides a "these guys are quite sweet" and "oh no, don't like these guys!"  Because that is not what the book is about.

Like many other early sci-fi books, "The Time Machine" (look also at "Flatland" or "A Honeymoon in Space" - or, to a lesser extent, "A Princess of Mars") the point of this is showing us an alien world.  In this instance, that world is Earth in the future, but that is not usually the case.  What is important to these authors is showing us how a different society could function.  Inventing a unique culture and just extrapolating from that, explaining it.  If such-and-such were the case, this is how it would develop.  It's about the imaginative creation of another reality.

Now that's all well and good (I love those books - why else would I be seeking to emulate them?) but in my own craft I am not interested in world-building.  No, strike that: I'm not primarily interested in world-building.

I do enjoy the imaginative exercise of inventing a whole other planet, a whole other ecosystem, but for myself personally if I'm not using that to tell a story then I am just not interested.

This is where the Flash Gordon thing comes along.

The other aspect I love about pulp is the pure storytelling part.  This is not relevant to the Victorian SF genre (for the most part) but is a big part of the type of pulp I love to read.  Something like The Shadow or Doc Savage.  Something fun and adventurous, that really moves.  Not great literature, but great excitement!

So how does that square with the Victorian exploratory SF genre?  That's what I'm trying to figure out as I go...

Both pulp story types have a similar approach to the main character.  Basically, he's there to be either a non-entity or an archetype, not personally affected much by events because there's no time for an existential crisis while an adventure is going on!  I try to modulate this in "Star Travels" by giving Dr. Jeremiah a personality and a development arc that is worth reading, but which doesn't interfere too much with the next big adventure incident.

But tone and pace, these are things that are tricky to juggle when trying to be both the world-building genre and the fast-paced adventure genre.  I keep picking on Flash Gordon because I love it (especially the Buster Crabbe serials) but also because it does a lot of what I want to do:  big, bold locales and environments, explored in short bursts of adventure by an Earth man out of his depths in a journey across space.

And I want to do that while honoring and continuing the more Victorian focus on exploring how these strange environments work.  And also having the kind of character development and interactions that a modern reader might expect - without doing too much that will weaken the period pulp pastiche of the story.

Even dialog poses a problem.  I want to stay true(ish) to the Victorian period pattern of speech.  More than that: Dr. Jeremiah Fothering-Smythe is essentially the kind of insufferable upper-class arrogant type that Bertie Wooster was.  He's not supposed to talk like your typical Englishman at the end of Queen Victoria's reign; he's supposed to sound like an arrogant toff whose experiences bring him down a peg or two.

But that leads to readers not enjoying the phraseology of the work.  (It's all first-person narrated.)  I also allow myself to indulge my penchant for flowery phrasing, and endlessly diverted sentences stuffed full of paranthetical asides.  It's all part of Jermiah's thought process, and so quite justified.  And it just so happens to be a slight exaggeration of my actual writing style, so yay.

My initial intent was to leaven this with more modern talk.  That the galaxy would be full of people who did not need to hold to Jeremiah's stilted Victorian speech patterns.  Thus far, however, I have not found myself resorting to that - and still do not know how well it would mesh with the style of the series.

I'm definitely easing up on the over-emphasis of the Victorian mode of speech.  A reviewer called my period writing sometimes a bit "too cod for comfort" (a criticism on point, and magnificently worded) and subsequent books (this was written about the first) do indeed try to lessen that factor.

Some of it is, of course, purposeful.  I want Jeremiah to at time be an annoying Bertie Wooster type.  In "Enter the Unknown" Captain Kraylik (the aggressor) speaks in a melodramatic Shakespearian mode of dialog.  But do the readers recognize this intent?  With so little actual speech, Kraylik probably comes across less as deliberately grandiose, and more as ridiculously over-written.

The book I'm writing right now has a species who speak in a similarly archaic fashion - and I hope it does not grate too terribly.  It's again on purpose (to mimic the speech patterns of a race who have not had contact with the rest of the galaxy for quite some time) but I recognize that it could annoy the reader.  And so I must make certain to include some characters (I know which ones) who speak in a less formal and distancing fashion.

Anyway, it's a constant struggle, trying to figure out how far in a certain direction to go each time.  I like to think that I aid in this by mixing up styles somewhat.  Book 1 was very HG Wells (in intent) while Book 2 is far more Edgar Rice Burroughs' "John Carter of Mars" in style.  Book 3 goes for steampunk Star Trek, while Book 4 is Flash Gordon filtered through George Griffith.

I hope I am getting the balance right more often than not.  Let me know how it reads to you folks!