54 pages • 1 hour read
Airborn
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Background
Authorial Context: Kenneth Oppel
Kenneth Oppel is a Canadian children’s and Young Adult fiction author. Oppel claims a lifelong interest in becoming an author. He sold his first novel, Colin’s Fantastic Video Adventure (1985), at the age of 18, after a family friend sent his manuscript to famed British author Roald Dahl. Though Oppel never heard from Dahl directly, Dahl enjoyed the manuscript enough to send it to his literary agent, leading to its publication (“Kenneth Oppel.” Kenneth Oppel, 2014). He wrote his second novel, The Live-Forever Machine (1992), during his tenure as a student at the University of Toronto. During the 1990s he achieved renown for his Silverwing series, which contains four novels published between 1997 and 2007, the first of which is the eponymous Silverwing. The series, which follows the adventures of a young bat named Shade, is based on the tale of “The Birds, the Beast, and the Bat” from Aesop’s Fables.
Oppel received the greatest critical acclaim for his Matt Cruse series, beginning with 2004’s Airborn. Airborn won a Governor General’s Award for children’s literature, The Bulletin of the Center of Children’s Books Blue Ribbon, and a Red Maple Award for middle-grade Canadian fiction. It was also honored by the Michael L. Printz Awards for literary merit in children’s fiction. The novel was twice optioned to be adapted into a film, though no film has yet been produced. Skybreaker, the second novel in the Matt Cruse series, was named The Times’ Children’s Novel of 2005 and was a 2006 Best Book For Young Adults per the American Library Association.
Since concluding the Matt Cruse series, Oppel has authored The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein duology (2011-2012) and the Overthrow series (2020-2021). He currently resides in Toronto.
Genre Context: Steampunk and Alternate History
Steampunk is a science fiction subgenre identifiable by its aesthetics, which are inspired by Victorian-era industrial technology, particularly steam-powered machinery. Though steampunk texts may operate in an entirely fantastical world, many steampunk novels and films take place in alternate histories. Alternate history is a subgenre of speculative fiction wherein an imaginary world splits off from the actual historical record. Put differently, alternate history often asks “what if” about key events in human history. These histories often depend on a singular, significant event that dramatically changes the trajectory of history. Gary Blackwood’s 2002 Year of the Hangman, for example, imagines what would happen if the British Army had defeated the colonists in the American Revolution. Unlike novels that look to the future based on current realities (as in, for example, George Orwell’s bleak predictions for life in 1984), alternate histories take place at some point in time before the author writes the text.
Steampunk as a genre differs from alternate history in that it does not rely on a singular point of historical divergence. Rather than framing one political or cultural event as its source of change, it imagines a world in which reliance on technologies that have become obsolete in the real world emerge earlier or continue to develop longer and come to shape the world. Common obsolete technologies that steampunk novels focus on include airships (such as in Oppel’s Matt Cruse series), automatons, and rudimentary computers, particularly analog ones. Clockwork is often a secondary prominent aesthetic and technological force in steampunk art.
The term “steampunk” first circulated in the 1980s, though the texts in this genre predate that nomenclature and include influences from 19th-century scientific fiction by authors like Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Mary Shelley. Steampunk texts often address contemporary social issues, including eco-consciousness, imperialism, and the role of technology in society. The aesthetics of steampunk have led to the emergence of a subculture that often uses advanced crafting techniques to develop elaborate costumes. These communities sometimes have anti-establishment political leanings, drawing on the “punk” side of the genre’s history.
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