NEWFANE — Vermont attorney Bruce Hesselbach's latest novel, “Perpetual Motion,” is a pre-WWI steampunk romance involving time travel, dirigible chases, appearances by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Richard Wagner, and gun battles.
Hesselbach, who has been writing fiction since college, won his first prize for a story in 1975 and has written professionally since the mid-1980s.
“I was a Yale English major and I won the James Ashmun Veech Prize for distinguished fiction writing. That was a great encouragement. My professor wanted me to go to graduate school and study English literature, and instead I went to become a lawyer.”
In 1975, he says, there were no jobs for professors, but “there were, however, jobs for lawyers, and I was going to get married and have to support a family, so I had to have something.”
He says he started publishing poems in the '80s, and has had 62 poems published in different publications.
He describes his early short stories and novels as mostly “zany, wild fantasy.”
“I had a short story with a minor character who then became the main character in the next story. I had three like that, and I probably could have gone on and on. Swarming Disenchantments won a small prize.”
His favorite reading matter was listed under travel and exploration, and he read a lot about explorers in Africa and Asia.
“I did a (hand-drawn) atlas of a fantasy land, mostly the civilizations in Europe around 1620. Based on that, it would give me ideas for stories,” Hesselbach explains.
When he's not reading or writing, Hesselbach is an enthusiastic hiker. He published a book about his hike of the Long Trail in 2005, entitled “High Ledges, Green Mountains” (Bondcliff Books).
“That was intended to be a big profit-making venture, but it had a limited audience. What I did to promote it was a slideshow of my hike, and I gave six different shows to different places. It was a lot of fun. I'm up to 494 mountains now. My big pastime is trying to visit new places and climb new mountains. Just doing the Long Trail is 90 mountains right there.”
The plot of “Perpetual Motion” was inspired by Hesselbach's research into prominent pre-WWI-era locales such as England and Germany.
“I was writing one thing after another, and the last thing I wrote before this had an episode in it that was sort of based on the resort town of Bath [a city in the ceremonial county of Somerset in South West England], which had a great spa, and it seemed like a really cool place if you want to have mystery and intrigue, with rich and powerful people meeting.”
That idea, he said, sent him researching all the spas and water resorts in England and Europe, particularly Germany and Switzerland.
As a fan of steampunk, a sub-genre of science fiction that typically features steam-powered machinery, Hesselbach saw an opportunity to incorporate Victorian technology of his own invention into the story.
“I've always been a fan of science fiction, but most of the Victorian-era technology - steampunk - is based in London, and it's just now expanding to other areas. I said, 'Why don't I do something in Germany?' I hadn't read any good steampunk in Germany, and being a history buff, I thought the run-up to World War I would be really interesting. It represents a traumatic, fearful spot in history.”
Hesselbach says that he “got to play around with ideas of time travel that have been knocking around in my head since forever. My daughter is an astronomer-physicist, so she's a big science fiction buff like I am, and it gives me somebody to talk to about the science fiction stuff.”
Although “Motion” is less “over-the-top” than Hesselbach's short stories, he takes pride in creating strong characters to whom readers can relate, especially as the novel takes place in the real world, not a fantasy realm.
“I thought it would grab people better than wild fantasy,” Hesselbach says. “The short stories were wild, zany and over the top. People loved them, but [the stories] didn't quite click with publishers for some reason.”
He explains he didn't write “Perpetual Motion” to have something commercially viable.
“I wrote it because the idea [alternative history where time travelers come from the future] really interested me, but while I was writing it, I was saying to myself, 'It has strong characters, people will be able to relate to it, and it's not in a fantasy world; it's in a world that people know.'
“I would say, unlike other fictional worlds, I gave a lot of attention to the characters because I thought they would carry the story, and that was something I put a lot of effort into. It seems like it paid off, because people say they're very strong characters.”
Hesselbach says his wife read it and said it was the best thing he'd ever done.
“I dedicated it to her because she was my number-one fan.”
In order to create a true-to-life slice of alternative history, Hesselbach did “tons and tons of reading.”
“I got to have some actual historical characters in my book, and I would read biographies and get accurate descriptions of them. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Richard Wagner are minor characters. It was fun to read all this great stuff.”
Hesselbach says that the hardest parts of his writing process usually involve the amount of advice he gets from writers' groups.
“When you're in a writers' group, they're always telling you, 'Rewrite this,' or 'Rewrite that.' I've got the idea of 'Get it all out, then go back and revise.' That can be a tough part, but it helps to have people who can give you advice and say, 'This worked and this didn't work.' I think it's very important to get feedback from people.”
Despite this, he claims “Perpetual Motion” was the easiest book he's yet written.
“Once I had a clear idea of the characters, it flowed pretty easily. I guess after you've written a number of [stories] you just get a better idea of where to go.”
Hesselbach will be a reader at this year's Brattleboro Literary Festival - and he's not done yet.
“I have an idea for a fantasy novel to be set in the British Isles, and also the novel that I wrote just before this one had a beta reader to give me some ideas, and get that in shape to publish. It's set in my fantasy world, but the theme is revenge. I think there's a lot of cool action in that one.”