Once upon a time, there was a website entitled Parlimant & Wake, a wonderful and strange amalgamation of words and images assembled by a couple in Michigan - James Schafer and Kate Franklin - partly as a response to the man's going through medical training. He's since rethought how he handles his life stresses, which is good for him (I'll say "hurrah" for anyone who can make personal progress) but sadly it has meant that P&W is no longer a working site. While they were putting things up there on the web, though, they leaned toward some pretty steam-punk-y styles in their choice of illustrations, whether the images were found or created specifically for the site. Images that I found both aesthetically pleasing, and also inspiring to my own pursuits.
One of the pages on P&W concerned the fleets of ships that transited between worlds, between universes, doing escort duty on convoys, enforcing policy, fighting the good (or not so good, depending) fight. The old photograph that headed that page's entry was (if I recall correctly) a bow-on shot of a dreadnought plowing through heavy seas. That image stuck with me, and when I got around to wanting to portray craft that transited between universes, guess where my imagination went? Where else but to the old dreadnaught image? Not for the first time did I consider using such a primary source as an old battleship for such workings, but that photo really cemented the idea.
I don't believe it was either one of these photographs, but ---
--- the image on the P & W site was much like these, and that is what stayed with me.
There are other images of battleships that float in the air as there has been a fair amount of art produced in that steam-punk-ish vein, and some of that certainly had a bearing on my consideration of how an ether dreadnought should appear. But as I have a bent toward actually crafting something that can be photographed, I needed parts, and that would also have a real effect on the finished appearance.
The parts that form the basis of my ether dreadnought are from model kits of the U.S.S. Arizona predominantly, with additional bits 'n' pieces from a model of the U.S.S. Missouri, and the Kriegsmarine's Bismarck. I state "kits" of the Arizona because I wanted structures and turrets both above and below what would be the waterline. I saw no reason for an aerial battleship to have firepower only commanding a field of fire that was, basically, "up." Once the ship is in the air, the field of fire becomes much more three dimensional, and so should the response to that. Not unlike the defensive armaments on the bombers of WWII.
As the Arizona was of the Pennsylvania class of battleships, I decided that, once done, Pennsylvania would be the class of these ships, too.
Originally, the ether dreadnought was the result of an idea for continuing the Riordan series, but after the Vera Packard series got to a certain point, and I already had the dreadnought model waiting to be used, I started crossing universes before the Riordan cover was more than a notion with a few background photographs taken. And no surprise, I was also taken with the idea of creating a series concerning a captain who's put in command of a squadron of ether dreadnoughts: Alexi Sokolov.
There is still floating one remaining American dreadnought: the U.S.S. Texas, now a museum ship - in Houston. It pre-dates the Pennsylvania class by several years, but one of these days I'm going to take photographs of it. Even though it means going to Texas.
The logo for Parliament & Wake's site; copyright: Kate Franklin, 2009.
On Parliament & Wake: I don't recall when I first encountered this site, but I was entranced by it from the first. Mr. Schafer and Ms. Franklin culled and pulled imagery and artifacts from history, and created images and collages to illustrate what amounted to serial story telling like the pulp magazines of 60+ years ago. They also used new photographic illustrations of themselves or friends in costume, weaving the images and stories into "thrilling tales" that kept me wanting to find out what the hell happened next! Their aesthetic was steam-punk, or -punk-ish, and while I wasn't going on in that vein, the consistency of what they displayed was, to me, admirable.
Part of what appealed was the similarity of the ideas and craft at the back of their works: the magics, the multiple universes with a central device - in their case a world-tree and a perpetual city, rather Yggdrasil-like; the grounding of the story ideas with real artifacts to which histories could be written; the effort to array characters with identifiable clothing; and the stories around which all this revolved, "histories" spun, and those characters lived and perhaps died. Perhaps not. Their work was different from what I wanted to create, yet observing their work did lend a firmness to my desire to do the crafting, to explore the nascent ideas, and pursue them to something I would find satisfying, and would also post on-line, as is evident in this site.
In addition to the inspiration for the Pennsylvania Class of ether dreadnoughts, Vera Packard owes some of her existence to P&W: one of the last things that I read of theirs concerned a recruiting drive for, I think it was, women to join a communications group that helped the fleets and merchanters finding their way between worlds. The poster image of a woman in an early 20th Century military style uniform with a clunky headset became the basis for a session of photographs with Rachel wearing a quasi-military ensemble and a clunky bakelite headset. Vera Packard eventually followed. Ms. Packard has gone in an entirely different direction than what I imagine P&W would have done, but the inspiration remains.
I owe them a debt of gratitude, if nothing else.
A few pages of their work can still be found by searching for Parliament & Wake on the web.
Thanks, James and Kate, for your works past, and looking forward to a future better yet.
