Review: Steampunk Summer Reading "Boneshaker" by Cherie Priest

Steampunk.  Love it?  Hate it?  Annoyed by it?  Or just plain confused by it?  Regardless of your personal stance, today I blog about steampunk, so prepare yourself.  If you have no idea what steampunk even is, let's define the beast.  Literarily, steampunk is sometimes called Victorian Science Fiction inspired by the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.  It can be set in the past, the present, or the future, but the technology is generally inspired by Newtonian physics, cogs, gears, and steam as if Einstein's physics and the microchip never occurred.  That's the "steam" portion of the definition.  The "punk" is showing the underbelly of technology or society and the need for change and reform regarding a specific institution, practice, or mindset.  Steampunk is more than a literary subgenre or an aesthetic in movies like Sherlock Holmes, Hellboy or Howl's Moving Castle.  Steampunk is also a fashion trend.  According to Cherie Priest (the author of Boneshaker, the book I'll be reviewing), the steampunk aesthetic is what happens when goths discover brown.  And there's some witty truth to that.  But steampunk fashion is chiefly concerned with DIY, handmade products, individuality, reusing & recycling, and taking inspiration from the Victorian era.  It's not just goggles, folks.  There are some great examples of the variety within steampunk fashions here.

Steampunk holds a certain attraction.  I think for people living in today's world, a world so technologically advanced it would give Sarah Connor an aneurism, technology seems like magic.  We know it works, but most of us have no idea how.  If my Droid Eris breaks, game over, man.  Game over.  I have no hope of fixing it myself.  I have to ship it off and for all I know, it will return magically repaired by faeries and goblins.  There is a certain appeal to machines that you can see how they work.  Steampunk gives us a lot of the same technological advancements without the mystery.  For me at least, another part of the appeal to steampunk is the alternate history "what if's" of the genre.  It's one of the things I adore about Priest's Boneshaker.  In Priest's America, the Civil War has continued into the 1880's.  I'm a total history nerd and I just love that.  Beyond that, growing up Jules Verne and H.G. Wells' stories fascinated me and near the end of high school I discovered Victorian gothic horror novels and thus a life long love affair was born.  I've always enjoyed the aesthetic of the Victorian era and its geo-political landscape.  The sun never set on the British Empire.  Brits drank tea with tigers and got an entire culture hooked on opium.  The American wild westward expansion pushed forward, while the Union and Confederates fought back east.  The 19th century is just a really cool time in history.  I'm not trying to romanticize it.  There were a lot of problems during this era, which makes for great opportunities for conflict in stories.  And what era of history is free of human mistakes and error?  Plus, steampunk is just plain fun.

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

Back cover synopsis:

In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest.  Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska's ice.  Thus was Dr. Blue's Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born.

But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown, Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead.

Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city.  Just beyond it lives Blue's widow, Briar Wilkes.  Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenage boy to support, but she and Ezekial are managing.  Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history.

His quest will take him under the wall and into a city teeming with ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords, and heavily armed refugees.  And only Briar can bring him out alive.

As a general rule, I tend to dislike the synopsis on the back cover of a book.  They're usually misleading or ruin the author's reveal about a character or a situation.  This synopsis, however, should be used to teach publishers how to write a good synopsis.  There are no major spoilers in it and it really nails the essence of this story.  With this synopsis you get what was advertised.

Though my life kept me from plowing through this story, I really enjoyed Boneshaker.  I loved the action, the characters, the plot, and the especially the setting.  Can you really ask for more?  Priest is a skilled writer.  She paints vivid scenes with an impressive economy of words.  I had writer's envy.

The story takes place in a ravaged Seattle in the 1880's, a dreary city that's limping along after the catastrophic event of the Boneshaker.  Priest brings us into a fully-formed world.  Though we hear rumblings about the Civil War that's still raging back east, Seattle is largely untouched, but not unaffected.  She even presents us with the black market consequences of the blight gas trapped in Seattle.  As the widow and the son of the man responsible for the devastation in Seattle, Briar and Zeke are outcasts in the Outskirts (where the refugees of Seattle live).  By the end of their journey, however, Briar and Zeke find what Zeke went into the city looking for, a home.

The story is fast-paced and you're swept away with Briar's mission to find Zeke and while you're running from rotters (Priest's zombies) and criminals you really learn to love and respect this quiet and direct woman.  By the end of the story, you realize that she really is her daddy, Maynard's, girl.  Priest said once that she wrote Briar to be her homage to characters like Sarah Conner and Ripley and that comparison makes so much sense.  You have to love a mother on a mission to save her kid.

Beyond Briar's tenacity and drive and Zeke's curiosity and loyalty, you have a cast of characters inhabiting this world that are diverse and amazing.  Two of my favorites were Lucy (the barkeep with a clockwork arm and a gas mask that she keeps tucked up her girdle in case of emergencies) and Jeremiah Swakhammer.  Really, his name says it all.  He's a bear of a man with a complicated gas mask that he loves, because he thinks it makes him look dashing.  But you also have loud and swaggering air pirates like Croggon Hainey and a Native American princess, Angeline, who's tougher than anyone in the book - anyone.

Boneshaker with its zombies and air pirates and evil criminal overlords will get anyone hooked on Cherie Priest's Clockwork Century world.  I have my copy of Clementine sitting on the shelf and I can't wait for Dreadnought coming this Fall.