Hadley Rille Books has some great titles coming out this month, and today we'd like to feature one of HRB's new novelists, Heather McDougal, author of Songs for a Machine Age.
Heather was born in Northern California and grew up in a rural summer crafts
school, where people from all over the world came to make things. As a result
she received in-depth training in pottery, weaving, cooking, construction, and
how to grow things. She has a degree in fashion design and eventually achieved
an MFA in sculpture, where she learned to blow glass and weld. She has a
long-standing fascination with automata and clockwork, particularly those of
the 18th century.
After many international travels, she now lives
in the same countryside where she was raised, along with her two daughters and her
husband, and works as an educator and a writer. She won a Writers of the Future
award in 2009 and has had work published in anthologies and magazines since
then. Songs for a Machine Age is her first published novel.
Heather has provided an excerpt from the novel, so please keep reading after her guest post.
Welcome, Heather!
~*~
The
idea for Songs for a Machine Age evolved from a robotics course I took for
teachers. They were running the robotics course in the traditional way, meaning
a problem-solving situation: you create the parts of the robot based on an
assigned task, and then tried to do the task. So, if the task was to move an
object from one side of a maze to another, people came up with, for example, an
arm that picked the object up, or a flat blade that pushed the object ahead of
it like a bulldozer.
I went along for awhile, but in the end the thing that struck me was how
prosaic, how mundane the challenges had been. And, when it came to building our
own robots, everyone came up with machines that spoke of industry, of tasks.
They all did something useful.
I, on the other hand, wanted to experiment. I built a little 4-wheeled vehicle
that had large and small tires kitty-corner to each other, so that when it
changed direction it would also shift its center of gravity, making it waggle
from side to side. It was a silly, floppy, dancing machine.
The others were interested in this machine of mine, its patently un-useful
being. "What does it do?" they asked me, and I said, "It
dances." And they all commented on how unusual it was. They scratched
their heads and smiled.
I couldn't get this experience out of my head. I went home and kept thinking
about it. I began to think about how much the Industrial Revolution has shaped
the way our society approaches machinery -- how, in fact, it was the needs of
industry that created machines, and we don't -- we often can't -- think
of machines except as framed in terms of their usefulness.
This view is actually changing these days. Burning Man, the Maker movement,
indie music and even playlist technology have had a huge effect on why and how
machines are created and used -- the making of fun machines has increasingly
gone from industry to the home, to the individual. And more and more, they are
being made for art, for fun, and for creativity. But what would have happened
if, somewhere along the way in the very beginnings of the industrial
revolution, the whole industrial paradigm was subverted into one of art and
creativity? What if some culture had rejected the industrial model -- if the
Sabots in France had been successful -- and that mechanical knowledge had been
rerouted into some different direction? What kind of culture would we have
then?
In its origins, Songs was my attempt to answer that question.
Songs for a Machine Age
There is a place where fabulous clockwork Devices fill Festival streets with color and sound.
Where the Gear Tourniers, in their places of high learning, keep alive the memory of the cruel horrors of an industrial past, now overthrown.
Where the skill of the hand and grace of the body are markers of true belief...
Elena alkeson has been on the run for six years. Wanted by the fanatical Duke of Melifax for witchcraft, nowhere in Devien is safe, as her gift for sensing impending disaster comes with a price: she can't keep her mouth shut.
...Until she meets Fen, who shares a similar gift: the gift of seeing inside mechanisms and knowing what they do. Elena and Fen must flee for their lives, going to the capital City of Helseve to seek asylum, and, perhaps, a life in which their gifts can be used for good. Amidst the machinery and the brilliance of the Autumn Festival, Fen and Elena find friencship, danger, and some powerful allise.
But Melifax and his sect, the dour Browns, are determined to bring the people of Devien into a new age, an age of moralism, conformity and mass production, ensuring that the beauty and pageantry of Devien and its Devices will be lost forever.
Excerpt from Songs for a Machine Age
Elena sat on a rock around which the vines flowed,
looking out at the curving slopes, staring at the distant winking light that
represented her enemy. The knowledge that they might be so close caught her in
an old terror, making her shiver in the darkness; and yet, the light of their
fire kept them distant. As long as the light remained, she felt she knew where
they were.
Come midnight, she was still staring
out at the blankness of the night and listening to the myriad scratchings and
squeakings of the night creatures. The hours wore dully, and she blinked away
sleep, aching with tiredness. The distant fire had long since dwindled to a
dull mutter of light, and she had to pee. Rising and stretching her stiff
limbs, she moved off among the vines to squat before she went back to wake Fen.
She had barely put her thumbs into the
waistband of her leggings when she heard a sound: a faint, rhythmic susurration
coming from downhill, somewhere among the many vines. Not the sound of horses
or men walking, but rather, a smooth, mechanical sound, like a Device on
Festival day. Curious, Elena squinted into the darkness, trying to see what
could be approaching in the thin moonlight.
The thing passed ahead of her, a few
rows along, only visible by a few silvery glints. Elena shifted, peering. It
stopped. She held her breath. Then, above the shoulders of the vines, she saw
something dark silhouetted against the starlit sky: something curved and
many-pointed.
Antlers.
Antlers made of brass.
She had seen those antlers before, had
thought of them often over the years. They dropped down again, and the
mechanical sound returned, shifted to a longer interval, and was gone.
Elena stood in the dark for a long
time, listening, but the thing did not come back.
Percival?
Here?
Why would Zander Alloway’s stag be
here, passing where she sat? Was it a sign from the Gods, from Ula of the
Grove, or perhaps Pomath, God of Hands and Making? What could it mean?
Memories rushed in, of days long ago,
of another night like this one, another sighting of the stag.
She
remembered the center of the meadow: the shape of a stag, alert and cautious,
shining eerily in the moonlight. She had tiptoed closer, her pain forgotten as
she watched his many-pointed antlers swing first this way, then that; the pale light
ran across his shoulders with a watery gleam, as if he were made of ice,
standing in that great lake of moonlight.
He had leapt
off, bounding through the shadows with a movement like liquid silver, and she
heard something odd: the sound of machinery, quiet and regular, a metallic
slithering. The stag itself was a Device, a Created thing. The beauty and
precision of it amazed her.
In the small
cottage later, after her collapse, the tall, knotted-looking man with red hair
and stern eyes whose hands had nevertheless been very gentle with her wounds, had
drawn up a chair and gazed at her with his queer, unsmiling face pulled down in
thought.
“What’s your
name, and where did you get those wounds?” he wondered aloud. She was sipping
broth and, as too tired and grateful for caution, her mouth gave her away.
“My name is
Elena Alkeson, and I—” Elena’s mouth snapped shut. His grim countenance cracked
into a grin.
“Cautious,
eh? Not surprised, with those welts on your back.” His grin disappeared as he
observed her curiously. “Seems as if you came across Percival last night, doing
his nightly rounds. Gave me quite a start, it did, when he came back.”
She had to
stop herself leaning forward. “Oh, was that your stag? He’s wonderful! Did you
Create him?”
It was his
turn to snap his mouth shut. She felt a perverse urge to laugh, but it quickly
turned into a wince, and he leapt up to help her get comfortable before excusing
himself while he fetched the water.
She had lain
in bed, watching the sun move across the beautiful quilt and wondered who this
man was. The broth tasted delicious, the bread crusty and fresh. On sleepy
impulse, she reached up to a shelf just alongside her bed and carefully took
down one of the little wooden boxes that were stacked there, higgledy piggledy.
It was about the size of her palm and made of some pale wood, with reddish
corners where the sides had been carefully box-combed together. The number two
had been carved delicately on the lid that opened beautifully on tiny hinges.
Inside, on
the clean wooden surface, rested two dozen or more tiny machine-parts, gears or
cogs of some sort, glistening as they rolled unevenly around on their pegs. She
reached in with a finger and pushed them around: they were hard, sharply-cut
little things, that stuck to her finger like the tiny beads her mother used to
sew onto collar-edges…
The sense of warmth and security that
came with this memory nearly undid her. As she squatted, she felt tears begin
to drip down her cheeks and off her nose, to water the grapes along with the
water from her body. Lifting her leggings, she wiped her eyes and, after a few
more minutes of staring into the dark, went back to Fen, who lay rigid under
his blanket.
“Fen,” she
whispered, “Wake up.”
He sat up immediately, letting out a
long breath. His face was shadowed in the wan light, but his shoulders sagged
with relief.
“There you are! I’ve
been awake for a half-hour or more, wondering where you’d gone.”
“Fen, listen, I just saw something. Something
wonderful! It may have been an accident, but I think it was a sign we are going
in the right direction.”
“What are you
talking about?”
“The stag, Zander
Alloway’s stag! I saw it, out among the vines.”
“Zander Alloway’s…what?”
“When I was escaping the Duke, it was
Zander Alloway who helped me. Yes, the
Zander Alloway. He had a Device, a beautiful stag, who appeared in a field and
led me to his house. I wouldn’t have found him otherwise.”
“And you just saw this Device again?” Fen
shook his head. “Are you certain you didn’t fall asleep and dream about it?”
“No! I had just got down from where I
was sitting to relieve myself, so I wasn’t even sitting. It was Percival, I’m
certain of it. I’d know that sound anywhere.”
Fen shook his head
again, as if to clear it. “But that’s just so…”
“Strange, I know. Fen, it’s not the
first time I’ve seen him, in the distance, at night or early in the morning. I
don’t know, maybe he’s checking up on me.”
“A Device, checking
up on you?”
Elena stared off into the darkness.
“Never mind.” She sighed. “I suppose it’s hard to believe if you’ve not seen it
for yourself. Listen, their fire’s gotten bigger again, down there. Can you
take the watch, please? I think I need some sleep.”
Fen nodded and went off into the vines
a ways, disappearing from view. Elena lay down gratefully, taking refuge in her
blanket as she settled into the grass at the end of a row of vines, the dry
leaves tickling her face.
Percival!
Here!
She smiled in the darkness.
Hail
Pomath, hail Ula. The Gods are watching.
