Heather Hiestand's Musings

Pirates: Are they the good guys or bad guys?

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This entry was posted on 1/13/2012 10:07 AM and is filed under In Books.

In the Steampunk Smugglers literary world that I've created, the term "air pirates" is used as an insult by the British Air Enforcement against smugglers, or free traders. In the modern world, pirates, whether they be on the seas, or on the internet stealing intellectual property, strike fear into our hearts. But they've also been heros of many a movie and novel. Why are historical pirates romanticized?

Dictionary.com defines the term in some of these ways:

1.a person who robs or commits illegal violence at sea or on the shores of the sea.
2. a ship used by such persons.
3. any plunderer, predator, etc.: confidence men, slumlords, and other pirates.

Perhaps one item at the heart of the issue is who are these illegal behaviors being committed against? If pirates are fighting governments that are considered bad in some way, maybe the pirates become folk heroes rather than the enemy. In the case of my stories, the "air pirates" are providing tax-free luxury goods to common folks, who aren't being offered many services by the government anyway, as well as trying to preserve a way of life forbidden to the common man. As my series develops (I'm working on #3 now), we see that the British Air Enforcement arm of the government, in particular, is doing evil things to crew. My heroes, air pirates or not, are in a position to stop them.

They are outsiders, both against government policies and against the usual way of life--they are travellers on the air, since this is a steampunk world where air travel became easily possible by the 1890s.

So in my world, at least, the pirates are heroes, even if there is a little theft and government-focused violence.

Heather Hiestand at Amazon

What do you think? Are the air pirates in Captain Andrew's Flying Christmas and Captain Fenna's Dirigible Valentine justified in their actions?
 

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