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Boneshaker
Catching up on various things I ought not have let slide (see icon). In the meantime, a review.
Priest, Cherie. Boneshaker. New York: Tor Books, 2009.
This might be the first year ever that I have actually read the majority of the novels up for a Hugo Award, and I have to say, Cherie Priest's dark steampunk fantasy is a strong contender for the top honor in my opinion.
I suspect that at this point introduction may well be superfluous, but I shall introduce the book anyway: Boneshaker is the inaugural volume set in Priest's Clockwork Century, a reworked C19th in which the Civil War has lasted 20 years, with no end in sight, driving all sorts of mechanical innovations along in its wake. At the same time, in Seattle, just before the Civil War began, an unfortunate consequence of the Klondike gold rush in the person of the mad inventor Leviticus led to the Blight, a poisonous yellow gas that seeps from the ground of the ruined city and turns those who come into contact with it into 'rotters.' Sixteen years later the former Briar Blue lives with her son Ezekiel in the Outside, the settlement that surrounds Seattle's walls, but when Zeke goes in to learn about his own history, Briar has no choice but to follow him, catching a ride on the airship called Naamah Darling.
I liked this book a lot, really quite a lot, for multiple reasons. Priest lives in present day Seattle, and her love for her city shows through on every page, even as she steadily wreaks destruction on it; furthermore, only someone who knows the city could have written its alternate past so well. I also liked a lot that while Priest's Clockwork Seattle is steampunk, it's also insistently chromatic (Angeline might be my favorite character, truly), but not an ahistorical post-racial paradise. Also, the women steal the show: Angeline, Briar, Lucy O'Gunning--they're all pretty damn awesome, and they're not intimidated by their own agency. Also they're crack shots. And Priest excels at finding alternate ways of describing objects from our time that make them fit into the past.
If anything my one complaint is that Briar and Ezekiel are frequently upstaged by the side characters; there are definitely too many ornery airship captains floating around, for one thing. And for another, I found Briar and Zeke annoying in that they make some very human choices which are very believable--they're like friends who are making mistakes that you want to talk them out of but can't. I liked Briar more than Zeke, as I might be expected to do; when![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
toft asked for steampunk books with kick-ass heroines recently I unhesitatingly reccomended this book, even though Briar is more the stubborn than the take-charge type; but I like her the better for that. She knows what she wants, she stays focused on it, she isn't afraid of or distracted by the schemes of the men she meets, and she's a hell of a shot with a rifle.
There is more Clockwork Century forthcoming: Clementine will be released next month by Subterranean Press, and you can read the story "Tanglefoot" here at the press's magazine.
Priest, Cherie. Boneshaker. New York: Tor Books, 2009.
This might be the first year ever that I have actually read the majority of the novels up for a Hugo Award, and I have to say, Cherie Priest's dark steampunk fantasy is a strong contender for the top honor in my opinion.
I suspect that at this point introduction may well be superfluous, but I shall introduce the book anyway: Boneshaker is the inaugural volume set in Priest's Clockwork Century, a reworked C19th in which the Civil War has lasted 20 years, with no end in sight, driving all sorts of mechanical innovations along in its wake. At the same time, in Seattle, just before the Civil War began, an unfortunate consequence of the Klondike gold rush in the person of the mad inventor Leviticus led to the Blight, a poisonous yellow gas that seeps from the ground of the ruined city and turns those who come into contact with it into 'rotters.' Sixteen years later the former Briar Blue lives with her son Ezekiel in the Outside, the settlement that surrounds Seattle's walls, but when Zeke goes in to learn about his own history, Briar has no choice but to follow him, catching a ride on the airship called Naamah Darling.
I liked this book a lot, really quite a lot, for multiple reasons. Priest lives in present day Seattle, and her love for her city shows through on every page, even as she steadily wreaks destruction on it; furthermore, only someone who knows the city could have written its alternate past so well. I also liked a lot that while Priest's Clockwork Seattle is steampunk, it's also insistently chromatic (Angeline might be my favorite character, truly), but not an ahistorical post-racial paradise. Also, the women steal the show: Angeline, Briar, Lucy O'Gunning--they're all pretty damn awesome, and they're not intimidated by their own agency. Also they're crack shots. And Priest excels at finding alternate ways of describing objects from our time that make them fit into the past.
If anything my one complaint is that Briar and Ezekiel are frequently upstaged by the side characters; there are definitely too many ornery airship captains floating around, for one thing. And for another, I found Briar and Zeke annoying in that they make some very human choices which are very believable--they're like friends who are making mistakes that you want to talk them out of but can't. I liked Briar more than Zeke, as I might be expected to do; when
toft asked for steampunk books with kick-ass heroines recently I unhesitatingly reccomended this book, even though Briar is more the stubborn than the take-charge type; but I like her the better for that. She knows what she wants, she stays focused on it, she isn't afraid of or distracted by the schemes of the men she meets, and she's a hell of a shot with a rifle. There is more Clockwork Century forthcoming: Clementine will be released next month by Subterranean Press, and you can read the story "Tanglefoot" here at the press's magazine.
no subject
And oh man yes on having a lot of cool, capable women around.
Really, for me, it felt like the weak point was the zombies -- otherwise the book seemed to be so...scientifically explicable, I guess? And then there were the zombies, who were sort of a mystery and didn't really obey natural law very well. Which I guess is part of the usual zombie "canon," but it was much less compelling to me than the rest of the story.
no subject
At times too the prose sounded a bit off-note to me, but I usually chalk that up to personal taste.