Flying Cars

When I woke up on New Year's day 2010, the first words out my mouth were "its January first twenty-ten, I want my flying car." Why that thought came, I don't know, yet it stayed with me. Somehow, after a childhood of Jetsons re-runs and movies like Star Wars, it seemed like an intellectual defeat to realize that that people were driving the same cars now that they were in the '70's. Eventually, I incorporated that idea into my writing. Below is a link to a story I wrote that won a writing contest this spring. It's a story called "Flying Cars"that ran in a print magazine called the Marquette Monthly in Marquette, Michigan. It's a human interest piece, not science fiction, but read it before you continue this post.

Flying Cars-2013 short story contest winner   


Whatever your opinion of the story, I'm not all that proud of it. I wrote this story more or less with this contest in mind (the prize was $250, which was what I was after). It's not my style, and a complete 180 from what I usually read. (Bradbury, Burroughs, Howard, etc.) Other people liked it, but I consider it  hack writing. I mention it mostly because says a lot about how I think, and the process that goes into my work. Bits and pieces of everyday life inspire me as much as anything else. The book Nick buys in that story is inspired by one I actually owned when I was thirteen, for example. I didn't think much about it at the time, but clearly it stayed with me all the way to 2010, with some vague hope gnawing at me that it might turn into science fact after all.

It's that kind of thinking that draws me especially to Dieselpunk fiction. I live a block from the theater where Anatomy of a Murder premiered in 1959. It's not a theater anymore, it's been converted into a book store now. Most buildings in this neighborhood have been re-purposed several times since their construction. Every day, walking down the street, riding the bus, I see 1930's era buildings in great disrepair that inspire me to visualize what they must have looked like in their glory days, and the world that built them. Dieselpunk (or any 'punk scene for that matter), is not a genre based on optimism. but it is one that explores a world that believed in potential and adventure, two things the modern day Rust Belt states are rather short on. And for all its flaws, the past seems golden compared to the seventy years of rust that cover it now. But I, like anyone, can imagine it even better than it ever was. And I intend to, one old book and rundown clocktower at a time.

-John,  June 2013.