Okay. So it's been a week. And I still haven't gotten back to that L5R discussion. But as Sweetheart told me, no one will really miss it, and I'm forced to agree with her, since I don't think I've found my audience yet - or have they simply not found me?
So it's a book review, instead. As I mentioned last post, I started on Cherie Priest's Hugo award nominee, Boneshaker. Boneshaker is touted as a steampunk novel, which, to me, is a bit misleading. It's more of a sci-fi horror/action/steampunk hybrid. There are zombies (horror), gun battles and chase scenes (action), and airships, strange inventions, and some late 19th century setting (steampunk). But the steampunk aspect is much more passive than active; steam-based technology isn't really there (although there are some inventions sitting around that use electricity), the airships are purely there as a deus ex machina to get characters to where they need to be, and the geographical setting (frontier Seattle - when Washington state was still Washington Territory doesn't exactly inspire the Victorian monolithic sense that old timey London or Chicago do.
Even the inventions play a rather minor role in the story. The most prominent role is the Boneshaker itself, which is only used as a narrative device to set up and explain the story's setting, and then it shows up at the end as an unused piece of machinery. Other inventions such as mechanical masks and some anti-zombie weaponry are there but are never the focus.
A brief summation of the plot is in order: 16 years prior to the storyline, an inventor creates a mining device for use in excavating through the Alaskan tundra when the machine goes on a rampage, destroying downtown Seattle and looting banks along the way. As a nasty side-effect of the sudden opening of the earth, a gas seeps out that kills inhabitants who breathe it in and then reanimates them into zombies. Seattle is walled off. The inventor's wife, Briar, gives birth to a son, but hesitates telling him about his father. Ezekiel decides to prove that his father wasn't a criminal by sneaking into the walled off section of Seattle. Briar finds out and goes in after him, setting off the events. Both Briar and Ezekiel have run ins with air pirates, Seattle inhabitants who eke a living in underground habitations, and a mad, mad doctor who controls a signifcant amount of power in the walled city.
All that said, I enjoyed Boneshaker a lot, and here are my reasons:
1) Characters - the two main characters (again, based on narrative perspective), Briar and Ezekiel Wilkes are good dynamic foils of each other. Where Briar, the mother, is much more guarded and jaded about life due to her past relationships with her father and husband, Ezekiel, the son, wants more options and is willing to stake more to find out why his mother is so guarded. As the story progresses, both characters go through similar hardships, both physically and mentally. This works out perfectly in the end when the two are reunited. The side characters are appropriately fleshed out for their roles in the story, and a few even get you rooting for them when bad things happen.
2) Pacing - the pacing is absolutely wonderful! There wasn't a point when I thought to myself, "The story is really dragging" or "Wait! Too much is happening! Must reread last two pages!" I think the action-based transitions from one section or another help out a lot with this. It's certainly easily managable and explained with the presence of hordes of zombies to chase characters from one place to the next. Add in some unfriendly human factions, guns, and a poisonous gas, and things can really move well.
3) Setting - despite my grousing about how the setting isn't conforming to the typical steampunk mold (and no story ever completely conforms to the genre mold unless it's making a new genre), I found the setting of a frontierstown-turned-haunted-wasteland to be interesting and posing of its own problems and story benefits. The most notable such benefit is that the timeline has the Civil War continuing longer than it really did (and well explained as being due to bad luck on the Union side of things), meaning no Federal government presence to trip up the plot. In fact, this a specific device, since several characters are looking forward to the immenent inclusion of the Washington Territory as a state so that they can get Federal aid in trying to stop and cleanup the poisonous gas.
I could probably list another few areas, but time stops for no man, and my hour of being at work before my scheduled hours has run out.
I'm hoping to work in some photos and maybe a video for the next post, so stay tuned!
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