Boneshaker / Cherie Priest

I succumbed to the early buzz about Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker. Early last month I bought it on impulse when wandering through Barnes and Noble downtown. I read her Four and Twenty Blackbirds a couple of months ago and thought it was pretty good, particularly considering I’m not a huge horror aficionado. Boneshaker is quite a different book though. The setting and subgenres are more to my taste, so I expected to like it. And I did. The book will go on my best of 2009 list.

This is the setup: in 1863, a scientist/inventor named Leviticus Blue built a giant mining machine for the (40 years earlier than actual history) burgeoning Klondike Gold Rush designed to dig through ice and extract gold. But through circumstances unstated, his test run of the machine burrowed under downtown Seattle causing a few of its major banks to collapse (literally, not figuratively), killing hundreds in the process. Worse, the machine hit a vein of underground gas that slowly seeped out, killing many and turning many more into mindless zombies. Unable to stop the release of the blight gas, the government evacuates the downtown core and builds a 200 foot high wall to contain it.

The story: Briar Wilkes is the widow of the presumed dead Leviticus Blue, who disappeared immediately after the catastrophe. She and her son Ezekiel, now in his teens, live in Outskirts, what’s left of the city outside the wall. Zeke wants to know his heritage, which Briar has kept from him. Was Leviticus Blue a killer thief, or just a careless inventor? Briar has said pretty much nothing. Zeke knows the basic history though because of the intense hatred most people have for the Wilkes. They figure she was in on it. If not, who cares? Because someone’s gotta be the scapegoat for Leviticus Blue. Anyhow, Zeke decides to don a gas mask and trek into the walled city to find evidence to prove his father’s innocence. Later, Briar follows him in to save him.

Doesn’t the premise just sound awesome? Sometimes a great beginning doesn’t continue with an equally fantastic middle or ending. Rest assured Cherie Priest pulls it off. It’s paced well. Everything fits logically. There are incredible fight scenes. Excellent characters, and I do mean characters. Explosions! Zippy steampunk weapons. Some psychological manipulation done fairly well. Yup. I’m satisfied.

But not only is Boneshaker filled with cool stuff, it ain’t just pure eye candy either. For instance, the story passes the Bechdel test quite handily. It does so without beating anyone over the head with overt feminist polemic, so the knuckle-draggers can read it without fear. Also, the notion of a walled city, cut off from the rest of the world except for just a few controlled points, has a lot of parallels with real life. Think about Gaza, or West Berlin. These actual places don’t/didn’t have deadly gas floating around. But without agricultural resources inside the wall, life would be pretty hard without the opportunity for trade outside the wall. Berlin had that, Gaza does not. Neither does the fictional Seattle in Boneshaker. Kept thinking about how people would survive living inside the wall, as some do in the story.

Stylistically, Ms. Priest also does a pretty good job of taking some of the more nonsensical elements of steampunk clothing and putting them to use. Why the goggles and gas masks? Deadly gas. Other steampunk aspects aren’t overdone like in Will Smith’s movie Wild Wild West. There’s steam-powered machines galore, but no giant robots with Babbage brains.

Good enough that I can overlook how much manipulation of Seattle’s history goes on here. The gold rush in the 1860s? The Smith Tower in 1863????!!!? That one really got me every time I looked at the map. About halfway through I glanced at the end of the book and saw there was an Author’s Note concerning this gross injustice of historical inaccuracy. Don’t email her, Cherie Priest says, she knows it’s wrong and she did it for the story. I’m still one of those people, but the note did work well enough to mollify me.

It’ll make an awesome movie too.

A few other blogged reviews:

• Val’s Random Comments
• Book Love Affair
• Robots and Vamps
• The Literary Omnivore
• Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog
• Fantasy & SciFi Lovin’ News & Reviews

Usually I include a few reviews across the spectrum of like/dislike in these links, so folks can get a feel for opinions other than my own. However, in this case, I haven’t been able to find any reviews where someone just disliked Boneshaker.

Title: Boneshaker
Author: Cherie Priest
Cover creator: Jamie Stafford-Hill (designer) / Jon Foster (artist)
Series: The Clockwork Century; 1
Imprint / publisher: Tor / Macmillan
Format: Paperback
Length: 416 p.
Publication date: October 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1841-1
Subject: Mothers and sons — Fiction
Subject: Zombies — Fiction
Subject: Northwest, Pacific — Fiction
LC classification: PS3616.R537 B66 2009