Dreadnought, Cherie Priest’s follow up to the Hugo and Nebula nominated Boneshaker, is the literary equivalent of a Schwarzenegger action movie. The joy is all in the explosions and chases. Just don’t look too closely at why anything is going on, because the reasons why the explosions happen don’t always make a lot of sense. Although this is the third book set in her Clockwork Century series, the story does not rely in the least bit on the previous books. In fact, some parts of it might be better if you haven’t, as you’ll have some explanations for artifacts that newer readers will not.

Mercy Lynch is a nurse in a Confederate hospital in Virginia. Shortly after she gets word that her Union husband has died in a prisoner of war camp, she receives a telegram from her long lost father, now dying in Seattle. Not having a large amount of direction in her life now that her husband is dead, she quits the hospital and embarks on a cross continent trip to meet her father. In the Clockwork Century 1880s, that means traversing the front lines of the Civil War, and then crossing the mostly ungoverned west.

The first part of the trip is to be made by dirigible. While the denizens of the Clockwork Century have some cool flying machines, what they don’t have is good non-flammable lighting. The soldiers below them can’t tell who they are, whether they are friendly or enemy. So they start shooting! That’s not good when your transportation involves giant balloons of hydrogen.

The second leg is to be conducted by train. Specifically, the Dreadnought, a highly armored and well-armed locomotive owned by the Union army. It just so happens that the most dreaded Confederate locomotive will be transporting war dead to their families out west and will be taking along a few passenger cars as well! It’s cheap, and fast, and the military will keep away the run of the mill train robbers. But just what is in that sealed car that supposedly carries bodies? Because it seems like someone wants it and is willing to bring some big guns to bear on the Dreadnought.

More than anything else, the key to Dreadnought is it’s plotting and pacing. The wait between pressure filled situations is perhaps 10 pages at most. Because Mercy is a nurse, she becomes a portable E.R. crossing the continent, starting with near-dying and dying soldiers in the war hospital, followed by battlefield nursing, and all sorts of other people needing medical care, all of whom could die quickly!

Though other people’s deaths frequently provide the tension, so does Mercy’s almost imminent death as well. Shooting at your hydrogen filled blimp? Staring down the mad doctor? Ducking behind piled up luggage as rebels shoot at you? Jumping between moving railroad cars and holding onto a frozen railing hoping that someone on the ledge will pull you up? You’d probably find fewer ways Mercy’s life isn’t in danger than is.

There’s actually less steampunk going on in Dreadnought than in the Clockwork Century’s first book, Boneshaker. That book had giant steam powered mining machines used to rob banks, mysterious gases and gas masks, a walled city, pipes and tubing, exotic weaponry, dirigibles, and more. The sequel has an armored train, more dirigibles, robotic exoskeletons for soldiers, and a tri-wheeled attack vehicle. And that’s about it. This is much closer to a straight western adventure than the previous book, and might work pretty good as a gateway drug for people who think they won’t like steampunk.

Priest includes a disclaimer at the beginning of the book:

This is a work of fiction, featuring impossible politics, unlikely zombies, and some ludicrously incorrect Civil War action. I hope you enjoy it! And I’d like to thank you in advance for not sending me e-mail to tell me how bad my history is. I think we all know I’ve fudged the facts rather significantly. (Except the zombie parts.)

With that in mind, I do want to bring up some of the impossible politics. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s interesting. Because the Clockwork Century’s version of the Civil War has stretched into it’s third decade, the South has changed how it treats its resident black people. All but two of the states have freed their slaves because economically they couldn’t afford to keep them subjugated with the war continuing. The result is that the South moves more or less voluntarily to where Reconstruction in our version of history brought them. On the one hand, I think it’s correct that economic forces really wouldn’t have done much better at freeing slaves and combating racism. But I also have to wonder just how much people would voluntarily contribute to a state that is actively fighting to keep them in slavery. There are economic and social forces that could make that happen. Priest obviously thinks about such things, but has also made a conscious decision to keep the focus of her books away from politics, so we’ll have to look to other books to explore the idea.

And because I’m a cranky dude, I do have to mention the plot holes. I can give Priest a pass on the ludicrously incorrect world-building. But man do I wish some of the action made more sense. The most dreadful Dreadnought seems quite tame when Mercy is a passenger. The reasons for putting civilians on the train seem really thin. The reasons why the train is going west at all are rather slight. Then there are the minor characters that all of a sudden decide they want to be spies, and then go back to being uninvolved immediately after their scene is through. I thought she built really solid motivations for her characters in the first book, so this was somewhat disappointing. So, uh, look at that shiny (and yet oh so gritty) boiler, it might be about to explode!

A few other blogged reviews:

• Val’s Random Comments
• The Speculative Scotsman
• Worlds in a Grain of Sand
• The Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf and Book Review
• Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog

Title: Dreadnought
Author: Cherie Priest
Cover creator:
Series: Jamie Stafford-Hill (designer) / Jon Foster (artist)
Imprint / publisher: Tor / Macmillan
Format: Paperback
Length: 400 p.
Publication date: September 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-2578-5

I loved Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, so I jumped at the chance for an ARC for her new book Clementine, also set in the Clockwork Century milieu. Ms. Priest offered Clementine in the Con or Bust charity auction, and I was the high bidder at $75. I normally wouldn’t pay that much for a book, as I’m not a collector, but it’s all about the donation, rather than the goods. For those who don’t know, Con or Bust raises money to send fans of color to science fiction conventions, primarily WisCon. Which fits right in with my attempts the last few years to read more diversely. It also thrills me that Ms. Priest supported the effort.

Clementine is a novella length steampunk story. Boneshaker introduced Croggon Hainey, pirate captain of the dirigible Free Crow. He doesn’t get a ton of ink there, but it does lead directly into Clementine where Hainey and a couple of crew members chase pirate Felton Brink, who’s pirated the Free Crow away from the pirates. And they aren’t too happy about it. As the story begins, they are finally about to catch up in Kansas after a cross-country chase from Seattle.

Maria Isabella Boyd is a former Confederate spy and actress, no longer trusted by the South and working for the Pinkerton detective agency out of Chicago. Her first assignment is to prevent Hainey from delaying the Free Crow, rechristened as the Clementine, from delivering it’s cargo to a Union Army weapons lab. She’s not particularly happy working for the Union, even indirectly, but a woman’s gotta eat. Not to mention she’s good at the cloak and dagger stuff.

I’ll call it Raiders of the Lost Ark meets steampunk, and I enjoyed it. Croggon Hainey and his crew are great. The action is awesome! 99% of it is dirigible on dirigible action. Armored dirigibles that is. Mini Gatling guns and hydrogen and ramming and death spirals! Also a big explosion or two. Short, digestible, and fun!

I gotta warn a bit. This is not the re-envisioned version of the Star Wars series, where Greedo shoots first and Han Solo becomes a pure hero. The good guys are bad guys. I happen to like that sort of thing. Stories where the heroes are white and the bad guys wear black aren’t as interesting. I want Croggon to win because he’s interesting. (Though if they are pure evil, they better be really interesting!)

The book does rely a lot on clichéd cloak and dagger antics and hand-waving to move the plot between scenes. Also, the dialogue often falls into one of my pet peeve categories, the overly logical laying out of cards on the table that leads everyone in the conversation to a mutually acceptable detente. I rolled my eyes and got on with the story, which as I wrote above is a hell of a lot of fun.

Despite knowing about Subterranean Press for years and having decided long ago I should be reading a title or two, I haven’t gotten around to picking one up before. I’m kind of surprised. Science fiction has some great small presses out there, and Subterranean is one of them.

One other blogged review:

• Rambles.net

Title: Clementine
Author: Cherie Priest
Cover creator: Jon Foster
Series: The Clockwork Century; 2
Imprint / publisher: Subterranean Press
Format: Advance Readers Copy
Length: 201 p.
Publication date: May 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-59606-308-2

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

I have a love/hate relationship with horror. I don’t want to be completely freaked out, reading only a page or two at a time and peeking at those from between my fingers, and yet horror that doesn’t fill you with some dread is probably not very good. Cherie Priest’s Four and Twenty Blackbirds sat in that middle ground fairly well for me and I quite enjoyed the story.

Eden Moore sees ghosts. As a girl, they are sometimes scary and sometimes helpful. As an adult though, it turns out that Eden is the target of a 165 year old ghost’s plan for resurrection. The resurrector being a mysterious resident from her family’s past, living in a remote swamp in southern Florida.

I really liked the character Eden Moore. She’s frightened at times, stoic at others. Came off very strong to me, not the least a one trick pony. Most of the other characters are very much supporting characters and they only stayed around for a while until the next supporting character stepped up to the plate. I kind of wish some of them had stuck around longer, because they were interesting.

The story was scariest when Eden was a kid early in the book. Good ghost stories don’t have a punch line, as a character in the book states. At the end, we know who the bad guy is, and we know what he’s doing. Effectively, the story becomes action-adventure with ghosts and blood and gore. Priest’s action scenes don’t overdo things, and she does make them somewhat original. I particularly enjoyed Malachi’s inept but almost effective attempts on Eden’s life.

Plot-wise, the major story line was pretty good, though a little on the convoluted side. It was all set up by Eden’s adopted mother Lulu refusing to explain the whole ghost/family history thing. The episodes where Eden encountered her family’s past got more and more intense. Sometimes they were ghosts, sometimes they were real people. The final confrontation didn’t disappoint.

On the whole, while there’s a lot of small things to question, the well-done ghost story makes up for the imperfections.

Title: Four and Twenty Blackbirds
Author: Cherie Priest
Cover creator: John Jude Palencar
Series: Eden Moore; 1
Imprint / publisher: Tor / Macmillan
Format: PDF download
Length: 285 p.
Publication date: 2008 (originally 2005 with this text)
Subject: Orphans—Fiction
Subject: Young women—Fiction
Subject: Blessing and cursing—Fiction
Subject: Racially mixed people—Fiction
Subject: Signal Mountain (Tenn.)—Fiction
Subject: Birthfathers—Fiction
Subject: Georgia— Fiction
LC classification: PS3616.R537F685 2005