Project Summary: Wild Wild West Fanfic, Precursor to Like Clockwork
I’ve mentioned in passing that my steampunk adventure novel Like Clockwork started as a fanfic project, but I haven’t gone into details. Basically, Wild Wild West was a guilty pleasure of mine for a long time, but as time passed it became more guilty and less pleasure as the limitations of the story and the thumb fingered handling of various subjects became more and more distracting and onerous. And of course, where canon fails, fanfic succeeds, so I compiled some ideas.
This was before I was on AO3 - before I had even heard of AO3, possibly before AO3 even existed. So I did not have an easy means of presentation or feedback. It never left the planning stage, although those plans got more and more detailed as I kept coming back to it. Still never came up with a title, though.
Overview: The basic premise was almost identical to the movie; Jim West and Artemis Gordon, under orders from President Grant, begin investigating some disturbing reports from the western frontier. In my original notes this involved strange and unexplained thefts and robberies, but a later version written after I had read A Country Made By War by Geoffrey Perret had Army Forts being attacked with no clear explanation as to what was attacking them. Either way, the duo head west on their pimped out super train, with Gordon doing some genuine 19th century forensics instead of the old “the last thing you see before you die is burned into your retinas” story, and West filling in the gaps in the science with strategic knowledge and practical common sense. Between the two of them, they are able to figure out some leads to follow.
These leads eventually introduce a character referred to in my notes as The Professor; he gets a proper name in Like Clockwork. The Professor was a chemist and engineer working on an experimental new artillery shell for the Union Army, but there was an accident at the powder works where he was building the prototypes. As Ellis would say in Left 4 Dead 2 regarding his buddy Keith, “Third degree burns over ninety percent of his body!” West and Gordon originally think somebody might have stolen the Professor’s research notes on experimental artillery shells, then as they travel further west they start discovering evidence that makes them think the Professor survived and was kidnapped and forced to work on the project.
Eventually they find a secret base, a full self contained city in a canyon just like in the film. Unlike the film, they get there with time to spare so they can sneak in and figure out what’s going on. Sneak might not be the right word, as they end up walking right into a room where the antagonist is waiting for them and has been since shortly after they discovered the trail of evidence leading them west. The antagonist is in fact The Professor. That’s not much of a twist, but there’s another twist right behind it; both West and Gordon have been operating under the assumption that their enemy is either a foreign power or a holdout of the Confederacy seeking to start conflict again. Neither could be further from the truth.
The Reveal: The Professor is, and always has been, a staunch abolitionist in the vein of John Brown,but rather than raiding an armory to take matters into his own hands, he worked tirelessly to empower the Union Army to wipe out the Confederacy. Even the disaster that burned him was shrugged off as a necessary sacrifice for a greater purpose.
Then the Confederacy lost, and the Union began the Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow laws and the prison plantations, effectively throwing the idea behind the Emancipation Proclamation down the outhouse hole just for the sake of political stability.
The Professor was not happy about this and decided to take matters into his own hands. Using his scientific knowledge he devised a series of weapons and weapon systems far superior in range, mobility, and destructive power than anything he had ever built for the Union Army, culminating in the Steampunk equivalent to a nuclear warhead: A Fuel-Air Bomb. Delivered by airships homed at his canyon base, The Professor could wipe out an entire frontier fort, or a civilian city, or an entire railroad junction, crippling a nation militarily and economically.
The Worthy Opponent: The Professor explains all this not to gloat, but to recruit. Unlike Arless Loveless in the movie who was little more than a caricature, The Professor respects West and Gordon; the latter as a fellow learned man of science and the former as an unrelenting force for justice in an often lawless world. He fails, but he keeps trying; before taking his air fleet out for a sortie against the railroads that the United States has become economically dependent on, he has them locked up, promising that they would be released once the United States had been brought to the negotiating table, either by threat of force or its use.
Of course, they escape and use one of the smaller craft - less fixed wing airplane, more autogyro / gyrocopter - to take chase in the skies; they board the flagship, fight their way to The Professor, and have a no-holds-barred fight which lasts quite a long time; one of the clues they used to track down the Professor in the first place was shipments of poppies, which he has been using to make 19th century morphine so he doesn’t scream himself to sleep every night. Even in the middle of fighting, punching and kicking and choke holds and teeth getting knocked out, The Professor is STILL trying to appeal to them both. Eventually, The Professor just collapses; Gordon has no context for a morphine overdose but his description of the body when doing a postmortem hits all the check boxes.
They use the airship’s missiles to take down the rest of the fleet, then land and scuttle the craft after an argument about a chapter long; basically, as much as they disagreed with both his methods and goals, they both agree the Professor’s intentions were honorable and just, and that he was not at all tempted to abuse the tremendous power he had created for personal reasons. Neither of them can say the same about their superiors in Washington, but the heart of the debate was if the risks of bringing back the ship to give the United States a major military advantage were worth the risk of the technology being stolen or reverse engineered and used against the United States. Of course, that canyon base and the professor’s allies are still out there, and many people saw what the airship could do, so all they can really do is delay the inevitable.
With the ship going up in flames, they ride off into the sunrise, as opposed to the sunset; not only do they have to head back that way to report to the President and await new assignments, but it’s also symbolic of the new era of technological upheaval they are heading into. The End.
What The Heck Happened: The original version of Like Clockwork started with that outline, with the serial numbers filed off. During the course of writing it out, during NaNoWriMo no less, the plot mutated. I followed the mutation to the end, but when it was all said and done, I did not like where it took me. I never bothered to publish it, but I kept it around so I cannibalize it for ideas.
So far, the biggest result of this fusion of old and new is a change in the setting; Like Clockwork was always intended as a Deconstruction / Reconstruction of the idea of a fantasy adventurer, either solo or as a team or as an entire aspect of a society and economy, and a war offers a quick reason why so many private mercenaries would be hanging around taverns looking for work. Likewise, a sudden outbreak of peace means that there is ample cause to suspect fellow adventurers of trying to instigate an international incident to start up the conflict again so they don’t go hungry.
