Having acquired a relatively recent interest in the steampunk genre, I decided to do some reading of what's considered major works of today, and having heard good things about Cherie Priest, I settled on Boneshaker as a good starting point, a book that is pretty much universally regarded as an icon of the form. I have read that Ms. Priest set herself the goal of creating an opus of the genre. My experience with this book was somewhat mixed, but some part of that must be laid at my own doorstep, as I came to the book with preconcieved expectations that were not met.
         Having myself written of the adventures of the airship Kestrel, I was hoping for an aerial adventure by a well-respected author in the field. I looked at the cover of Boneshaker, saw a woman wearing what I assumed were aviator goggles with two airships reflected in the near lens, and put it on my "wish list" with several other books. My birthday rolled around, Boneshaker turned up with some gaudy paper taped around it, and I dilligently read it from cover to cover. It wasn't what I had expected it to be, in fact, it was much like work, but I will apportion blame for that as half for my assumptions, and half for the misleading cover art. There was no disappointment with Ms. Priest's literary skills; she is a workmanlike author who does journeyman's work with her subject.
         I'm going to try not to spoil anything, while at the same time giving you a thorough picture of what's going in the book.
         The book takes place in Seattle (Ms. Priest's home city) in the period around 1880. The Civil War has dragged on for sixteen long years, though that is only a distant narrative taking place back east. Seward's Folly hasn't yet happened, and Russia still owns Alaska. They offer a prize to anyone who can invent a machine to extract gold from the frozen Klondike, and the call is answered by Leviticus Blue, who produces the Boneshaker, a huge subterranean manned drill which runs rampant beneath old Seattle, destroying much of the city, and releasing a gas (speculated to originate within volcanic Mt. Ranier) that rapidly turns people into zombie-like creatures called rotters. A wall is built around the ruined part of the city that contains both the rotters and the heavier-than-air gas that creates them.
         This all happened years ago. Now, Blue's widow, Briar Wilkes, lives outside the wall in the hardscrabble town Seattle has become. She works in a grimy water purification plant where she is reviled by everyone who knows the story of the Boneshaker, and knows who her husband was. Her fifteen-year old son provides the initiating event for the novel. He never met his father, but has suffered the same torment from people who believe "like father, like son," and one day while Briar is at work, he dons an old gas mask, and slips into the walled city to find his parents' old house and somehow prove that his father wasn't the monster everyone says he was. Briar intimidates one of his street urchin friends into telling where he has gone, and goes into the city to rescue him.
         Both discover small communities of normal humans, in the sense that anything living in this hellish environment can be considered normal, living within pockets of good air, pumped down from above by the backbreaking toil of the Chinese community inside. These various factions live, for the most part, in an uneasy truce made tenuous by mutual suspicion and competition for the scarce resources available. They encounter a not-quite-mad inventor who some people believe is Levitcus, and want Briar to confirm or deny this for them. Briar wants her son back safe, there are a lot of conflicting goals, and once the doctor hears of Briar being in the city, he becomes very interested in having her brought before him. Is it because he's her husband, and wants her confirmation, or because he isn't, and wants her silenced? The doctor's efforts, and his reasons for them, make an intriguing sub-plot for the main action to play out against.
         I regret somewhat that I came to Boneshaker with a preconceived notion of what I would find there. While she does get into the city by taking a dirigible ride, and there are one or two brief excursions after that, most of the story takes place in underground tunnels, with occasional forays to the surface, mostly while running from hordes of rotters. This is well-handled by the author, but often read to me like a literary adaptation of the Left4Dead videogames, or a Dungeons & Dragons adventure. I guess at the end of the day, I could sum up my feelings by saying that steampunk offers a lot of unique opportunities that were mentioned in this work, but left on the table without being explored.
         That sounds harsh, and that isn't how I want this to end. Cherie Priest is a skilled author with a large following who is a leader in her field. This wasn't the tale I wanted to read, but it was woven by the hand of a true professional, and anyone who enjoys an all-in adventure story with a mystery ticking in the background would be well-advised to seek out Boneshaker. Just don't be fooled by what you see on the cover...
         Cherie Priest has published many books, and not all of them works of steampunk. She maintains a writer's blog at http://cmpriest.livejournal.com and there is a link there that will take you on to her official website at http://cherieprist.com.

Disappointed. The teases on the back cover gush about rewriting American history, and a closed environment teeming with colorful characters hiding great mysteries. While Ms. Priest may not have written those blurbs herself, I found no profound changes in the world at the end of the day, no particular growth in the characters, and the only mystery is why the people inside have spent 16 years fighting for the right to live like hunted animals when all they have to do is leave. Sorry, but I left with more questions than I arrived with. Frankly, if this is a pinnacle of the steampunk genre, I'm probably done...

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Created Feb 23, 2013 at 1:24pm • Submit your own review...