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

During my workout this morning, I finished listening to the audiobook version of Jay Lake’s Mainspring.

The big selling point for Mainspring is the world Jay Lake has created. The world looks much like earth in the late 1800s. Earth is a mechanical world. Massive brass gears around the equator spin the Earth around the sun on a brass orbital track. Young Hethor of New Haven, Connecticut receives a visit from the Angel Gabriel, telling him that he has to save the world. What follows is a very by-the-book fantasy hero quest, other than the fine world that Hethor explores along the way. It has a somewhat promising beginning, but goes slowly downhill and more or less falls off a cliff by the end.

I thought Jay Lakes characters in Mainspring were pretty deficient. Other than Hethor and his lover Aurelia (sp?), none make more than passing appearances. The book never explains their motivation, and often they do things that make no sense whatsoever. Librarian Childress of Yale, for instance, decides to help Hethor in his quest when respected members of the University (namely the sons of Hethor’s master) accuse him of theft. Later she gives him a password to a secret society that helps him, though why this would be part of their charter remains unexplained. A female hearse driver makes a pass at Hethor, perhaps because he is naively innocent. Hethor declines and that’s the last we see of her. That’s perhaps the biggest drawback of the characterization. After grand entrances, most make quick and quiet exits. Librarian Childress, the hearse driver, a country farmer, numerous navy sailors, a Jade Abbott, numerous correct people and others. In and out.

Plot-wise, Mainspring is kind of a mess as well. While the world Hethor explores is fantastic, Hethor gets thrown into places it seems merely so Jay Lake can show it off. Early on, Hethor gets thrown into a dungeon full of candle people by the Viceroy. Locked underground, these folks make candles all day. Why? Who knows? Later on, after being press-ganged into a naval zeppelin ship, they explore a vertical city on the equatorial wall. An abandoned city. In this case, the explanation is that the ship chases after an a band of the Queen’s army that recently visited the city. No one is there, of course, and just as the army is about to be found, Hethor is snatched away by winged savages.

Are the winged savages, friend or foe? At first, they attack the zeppelin. A later attack has them kidnapping the navigator, and a still later attack they kidnap Hethor. At this point, I thought they might be under the control of the Jade Abbott. But why go to such bloody and elaborate lengths? Hethor’s kidnapping in particular. There is plenty of opportunity for them to get him without a fight. In later chapters, they attack Hethor’s party mercilessly.

Hethor himself is not very likable. He’s whiny. His thoughts are repetitive. Again and again the narrative of his thoughts has him recap events and mantras of the past. Midway through the book, Hethor gains magical powers. Not only does this subvert the mechanical world, but Hethor manages his escapes conveniently. Oh, they are still harrowing, but mostly because Hethor is obstinate and doesn’t think he’s worthy of his role. Until things looks really grim when he turns to his magic and his band survives (after losing a few more people each time). And for the life of me, I can’t tell what the beef is between William of Ghent and Hethor. Rule of thumb over rivalries based on obscure religious canon: use real religions rather than made up ones. It makes it super hard for this reader to care when the moral being fought over has no meaningful analog in my world.

Pretty damn unsatisfying, despite a promising beginning and what could be a fun world to explore.

Some other blogged reviews:

• Bibliophile Stalker
• Fascination Place
• Rev-e-rie
• jasondwittman
• Athenæum
• Orion’s Archive
• Lord of All Fools

Title: Mainspring
Author: Jay Lake
Cover creator: Stephan Martiniere
Series: Mainspring; 1
Imprint / publisher: Macmillan Audio via Audible.com
Format: Audiobook
Length: 13 h., 24 m.
Publication date: December 2007
LC classification: PS3612.A519 M35 2007

I don’t know if it’s the steampunk sub-genre or the fact that the publisher is U.K. based, but a lot of the stories in this original anthology have a distinctly British flavor to them. Certainly a Dickens style world lends itself well to steampunk’s low-technology ethos, dark brooding and full of all sorts of intrigues that can serve as a basis for a plot. On the other hand, it starts to feel a bit monotonous after a bit. The last four stories thankfully aren’t Brit themed, but you gotta read a while to get to them (or intersperse them out of order now that you know).

I definitely appreciate getting the chance to read a few authors I haven’t been exposed to prior to this, at least beyond seeing their names mentioned in a few reviews here and there. I think this is my first reading of eight of the twelve authors appearing.

My favorites of the anthology are from Roberts, VanderMeer and Lake. Lovegrove’s Steampunch is a good opener as well. There’s nothing I hated or couldn’t get through, even with Youmans’ confusing Static. I normally hate the stories that confuse me, but this offered other delights. Good to see a fairly new imprint in SF making a name for itself. As they say on EBay, AAA+++.

Steampunch, James Lovegrove

An old hand at a penal colony tells a newcomer his story. He used to train Steampunch, the mechano-boxing legend, before robot fighting was declared illegal. Battlebots with an edge. Decent story.

Static, Marly Youmans

I couldn’t really figure out most of what’s going on here. There’s a lot of electricity in the air. Not tension. Electricity. And a woman abuses and/or treats poorly her ward, her grand-niece. On the good side though, Youmans uses some great metaphors in the story. Nothing was thrown away at The Towers, so time accumulated its sediments inside hatboxes and wardrobes. Great stuff. If only I understood what was going on.

Speed, Speed the Cable, Kage Baker

Saboteurs scheme to destroy the Trans-Atlantic cable before it’s even been laid. Counter-schemers plot to prevent this from happening so their secret world domination plans aren’t disrupted. Kind of eh, but not bad.

Elementals, Ian R. MacLeod

I’ve never much been fond of Law of Attraction kinds of things. I’m a born skeptic. If science ever shows that it’s true, I’ll gladly go along. But until then, it’s a lot of hooey (like most of the anti-Obama bull-crap that right-wing ignoramuses spout on blogs and chain email). Elementals is a law of attraction kind of story. Not that MacLeod believes it (I’ve no evidence either way), but it’s mere presence as the unifying theme of the story biases me against it (like it did against a similarly premised Ursula K. Le Guin story from an anthology). The premise here is that elementals are energy spirits that can inhabit people or things and provide them a life of their own. The key this time is that people have to believe in them for them to be effective (or at least believe in their effect, kind of like a self-additive bubble). The scientist who has discovered them and determined a process to use/enhance them can’t convince people his theory is sound, and so he falls by the wayside because no one believes in his elemental self. To sum up, eh.

Machine Maid, Margo Lanagan

I could see where this story was headed fairly soon in, so there’s a strike against it. On the other hand, Lanagan wrote something that affected me in a way that doesn’t happen all that often. She wrote a character that I really dislike, but also one for whom I felt a lot of sympathy. Mr. Goverman owns a remote Australian tract of land, and moves there with his wife (the story is about her) to better track his investments in nearby gold mining. Mrs. Goverman hates sex, and detests contact with her husband. Then she discovers that the electric maid, Clarissa, has functionality to service male owners. I dislike the character for being both insufferable and a prude. And I sympathize with her for accepting/allowing that which she so clearly hates as well as her distaste for her position in general that she feels forced into by society. The plot isn’t anything to write home about, but the character and some of the moral implications are quite interesting.

Lady Witherspoon’s Solution, James Morrow

I don’t doubt that Morrow’s tale is a take off on Hitler’s Final Solution what with references to Nietzsche spread throughout the text. In the satire, Morrow not only spoofs 19th century feminism but also the Nietzschean übermensch. A couple of spots in the story made me laugh here sitting in my favorite coffee shop. And that ain’t easy to do.

Hannah, Keith Brooke

The intro by Nick Gevers says Hannah is about medical ethics gone bad. Seemed more like a garden variety cloning story to me.

Petrolpunk, Adam Roberts

An alternate reality version of steampunk. Featuring a writer Adam Roberts and an editor Nick Gevers in a world where steam technology continued to be dominant because of a Compound that is added to water to lower the boiling point to 40° C. Of course, Compound is also toxic. But from an alternate reality comes other people who want to steal the petroleum and ship it through dimensional gates to their petroleum based worlds. Quite good, even if I really am tired of British themed stories at this point.

American Cheetah, Robert Reed

Finally a non-British theme! Robot Abraham Lincoln faces off with robot Jesse James gang. Reminded me a little too much of Asimov’s robot stories for me to go hey neat. That and there’s already been a couple of robot stories in the anthology. I prefer the less intelligent versions of Steampunch or Machine Maid if we’re going to have a steampunk story. Again, it’s not bad. But it didn’t stand out either.

Fixing Hanover, Jeff VanderMeer

Another robot story, but this one stood out for me. Not quite sure why. I liked the interplay between Daniker, Lady Salt, and jealous Blake. The steampunk aspect isn’t the important part of the story, though it adds spice. Though it could use a better title.

The Lollygang Save the World on Accident, Jay Lake

I’ve generally been a sucker for created worlds. I don’t mean world-building, though that is nice and has a part in created worlds. I mean artificial worlds, like ringworld, or Dyson spheres, or the smoke ring, or Virga. But they don’t have to be space-based. I loved the Linear City. This story features a created world consisting of a very large Pipe of indeterminate size. Where is it? Doesn’t matter. Could be in space. Could be on a planet somewhere. People live in decks inside. It’s been created by beings as an experiment, and most likely left to rot. Many parts of it lay disused and in disrepair. Unused communications devices. Pipes and tanks with unknown fluids. Totally awesome! The Lollygang (which is as you might think from the name, a youth gang), come across Gloves which let them perform feats unimaginable in their world. “Magically” opening locks and whatnot. Not really sure what they can do, and for once I didn’t care that I didn’t know. But the gloves have a way of taking over. Sounds contrived when I write it out, but it really works in the story.

The Dream of Reason, Jeffrey Ford

I believe Jeffrey Ford is the author that told me to kill myself this summer. And you all thought I was cranky one on the internet! The Dream of Reason is a good story about one man’s scientific experiments to determine the composition of stars. His theory, if he slows light enough eventually diamond dust will fall off it. Dust picked up by bouncing off far away stars. But how to slow it down enough? And how to build a big enough device to conduct the experiment (it’s like a steampunk version of the Large Hadron Collider!).

Solaris Books provided this mass-market edition of Extraordinary Engines free of charge through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. In return for a free copy, I am obligated to post a 25 word (or longer) review on LibraryThing. This entailed no other obligations.

Title: Extraordinary Engines: The Definitive Steampunk Anthology
Editor: Nick Gevers
Cover creator: Adrian Wood (photo) / Alex CF (artwork)
Imprint / publisher: Solaris
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 441 p.
Publication date: September 2008
ISBN-10: 1-84416-634-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-84416-634-3