2001 Arthur C. Clarke and BFS – PERDIDO STREET STATION by China Mieville

There’s no denying that expectations play a big role in how I see these books.  Here we have a book by an author whose work I've liked, who has the sort of social science perspective that I love in my sf, and it’s one of the foundational works of the intriguing “New Weird” sub-genre.  I really wanted to love this novel, and I’m pretty bummed that I didn’t.

It gets off to a great start.  The main attraction here is the world-building, and the opening chapters are chock full of it.  The setting is the city of New Crobuzon on the fantasy world of Bas-Lag.  There’s magic, steampunk technology, and a variety of weird, hybrid sentient species, taken from different world myths.  The khepri have insect heads like an Egyptian god, the vodyanoi are frog people from Russian folklore, the garuda have wings and bird heads and are inspired by Hindi stories, the cactacae are cactus people based on the venerable folk story Final Fantasy.  There are also odd-looking people called Remade, deformed in imaginative ways by magic (er… “thaumaturgy”).  The infrastructure of the city is wonderfully described – part of it is in the massive skeletal ribcage of a long-dead giant beast, it’s full of zepellins and trains, and there's a rich sense of the geography from the gritty streets to the high spire in the center.  Mieville’s descriptions not only evoke a fully-formed urban aesthetic, but also a whole host of accompanying suggestions of class and race, which are missing from most nobility-obsessed high fantasy.

The protagonist is Isaac der Grimnebulin, a human scientist who’s dissatisfied with academic life.  He lives in a bad part of town, and often visits an even worse part of town to hang out with his artist friends, including his khepri girlfriend Lin.  Around the same time Lin and Isaac both get big commissions.  Lin is to sculpt (out of khepri-mucous and berries) a statue of a horrifically self-Remade druglord named Mr. Motley.  Isaac is to create a flying apparatus for a garuda who’s lost his wings, named Yagharek.  Improbably, these plot lines come together when a super-drug producing Lovecraftian moth-thing escapes Isaac’s care and rampages throughout the city.  Isaac must team up with Yagharek, sentient steampunk constructs, a demented giant spider called The Weaver, and others, to hunt down the moths.

Yes, it’s self-consciously weird.  I like that about the novel, but I think there’s a fundamental schizophrenia here.  Mieville wants to have crazy beasties, perpetual motion machines, magic, and steampunk, and he wants to tell a straightforward action tale.  He’s not able to pull off both.  Most of the book, including the entire second half, bogs down in endless fights, chases, and climbs, and Mieville seems committed to giving us a detailed play by play of every move.  The hunt for the moth monsters comes to consume the book, pushing aside its weirdness and any deeper significance.  Did Mieville really come up with all of these ingenious freaks just to have them team up for a super-battle?

Among the things that get lost in Mieville’s pursuit of Weird action is social commentary.  As I said, there are rich suggestions of class and race as issues, and there’s a vague critique of the city’s authoritarian government, but Mieville never really develops these ideas.  Mieville has a Ph.D. in International Relations (though I guess he was still finishing up when this came out), so I expected the novel to be about society on some level.  It seems that Mieville is creating metaphors in New Crobuzon, but they’re not particularly well-developed or evocative.   Again, action and self-conscious weirdness get in the way.

I can’t say I particularly cared about the characters either.  Isaac is grumpy, consumed by work, and ambivalent about his feelings for Lin, which adds up to something that’s certainly not generic, but not particularly compelling either.  Everyone else is pretty much a cipher, at least until the final chapter adds layers to Yagharek.  Not being invested in the characters made those endless second-half action sequences even more interminable. Weird also gets in the way of the prose at times. Mieville shows flashes of his talent here, and the descriptions are far richer than your average sf, but he comes up with some off-putting metaphors (e.g. “his body wobbling like a bloated testicle”) and strange diction (“his body was thin…with a healthy emaciation”).  I might applaud the originality of his language if I wasn’t so busy throwing up. Add in the aforementioned overwrought descriptions, and I wanted to yell at Mieville to put the thesaurus down and get on with it.

It was almost like I could see Mieville finding his voice as a writer throughout the novel.  He immediately turns the fantasy genre on its head, but then he doesn’t do much with the new world he’s made.  The ideas are there, but they need to be more developed in less space (I suspect I’m going to find many more books about a 1/3^rd too long in this decade, as pagecounts continue to grow, more due to trends in publishing than to any actual artistic reason).  I wanted this book to be so much more than it is, but I am still going to check out the other two Bas-Lag books.

Grade: B-

2011 Not a Hugo Nominee: Novel - THE HALF-MADE WORLD by Felix Gilman

This novel got a lot of buzz in certain circles as a smart steampunk novel; I mentioned it while discussing the Stross-engineered Great Steampunk Debates of 2010. I hate to play the genre game, but I didn’t get much of a steampunk vibe from this novel. There are a few anachronistically-complex war machines in a nineteenth-century setting, but they don’t get much more than an occasional mention. It’s really a metaphorical fantasy novel with western trappings. But now I’m just being pedantic.

The novel takes place in a world much like late-nineteenth century America but with different place names and ravaged by a conflict called the Great War. On one side is the Line, powered by the Engines. The Engines are giant mechanical beasts with their own intelligence, and, apparently, immortality. They’re like clockwork Lovecraftian horrors. The Line is made up of their human recruits, who conquer territory and spread the Engines' reign with sheer numbers and horrible mind-destroying weapons of mass destruction. On the other side is The Gun, made up of a different sort of supernatural intelligences, embodied in weapons, who recruit Agents to spread anarchy in opposition to the Line. The Line continues to march ever westward, while the Agents of the Gun wreak havoc on the frontier. Beyond the frontier, the world is more surreal (not-yet-made) and inhabited by the First Folk or Hillfolk (somewhat discomforting Native American analogues).

Decades ago, the Red Valley Republic tried to create a civilized, democratic society beyond the power of either the Gun or the Line, but, in 1878, they were defeated in battle, and the heroic General Enver was driven mad by Engine weapons called Noisemakers. in 1889, Enver reappears in a mental asylum, and Gun and Line begin to fear that he knows a secret that could destroy either of them, or both. The Line, under a bureaucrat named Lowry, begins to bear down on him, as does an Agent named Creedmoor. Enver’s doctor, a young widow named Liv Alverhuysen tries to protect him from both.

You can probably tell from my brief description of the set-up that there’s some pretty clear metaphors going on here. The Engines obviously represent the spread of industrial capitalism in America’s Gilded Age with the machinery and the relentlessness and the bureaucracy and the chewing up of workers. The Gun, I assume, represents anarchists, labor agitators, and outlaws (who many historians see as explicitly opposed to industrial capitalism – did Jesse James attack banks for ideological reasons or because that’s where they kept all that money he wanted to steal?). The Republic shows us American ideals at their best, which are then overridden by industrial capitalism. It’s all so clear. A little too clear. The metaphor really overrides world-building here. It’s a thoroughly reductive, two dimensional world; a bleak two-by-four to the head. And, as I mentioned before, things like the depiction of Native Americans as magical fairy-beings in the unformed mystic lands beyond the frontier get downright ugly.

Despite this issue, the characters, especially Creedmoor, were compelling enough to keep me interested, and there’s a lot I like about this world, especially the Western setting. The ending left me thinking a sequel was coming, and I would be interested if Gilman focused on filling in the many gaps in his simple world and adding more nuance.

Grade: B-

2011 Hugo Nominees:Graphic- Girl Genius 10: Agatha Heterodyne & the Guardian Muse, by Foglios; Schlock Mercenary: Massively Parallel, by Howard Tayler

Did you know that Phil Foglio has won more Hugo awards than Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke combined? Okay, that’s a lie that I just made up, but if this category keeps going, it has a good shot of coming true. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that something dominate a category if there is annual work that consistently tops the field (Doctor Who has been the best science fiction on tv for most of the past six years, I’d say, and the awards back that up). But “graphic fiction” is so much broader than Hugo nominators seem to recognize, and I don’t think this is the best work done in the field. This is a strong, familiar, and welcoming series, that helped start the whole fad (extremely fun at first, though perhaps a bit tired by now) of the female mad scientist in the steampunk world, and it’s by the Foglios, longtime WorldCon fan favorites and all around super-nice people. That makes it hard to complain about, but, for the third volume in a row, we’re stuck in a castle, and the jokes and plot get increasingly insular. If you haven’t read volumes 1 through 9, don’t bother with this one. I understand why this comic has a rabid fanbase (that happens to have a very strong correlation with Hugo voters), but is it the finest graphic fiction produced last year? No.

I think I need to retire this rant.

Schlock Mercenary is an occasionally funny military sf comic strip that I didn’t like much when it was nominated last go around. More of it was published last year. I didn’t read much of this volume, but I didn’t see anything to sway my opinion from what I did see.

2011 Hugo Nominee: Graphic Story - Grandville Mon Amour, by Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse)

Lots of people have tried to “fix” the Graphic Story category by suggesting nominees, and this graphic novel, the second in a series, was one of the most touted, especially from British quarters. It is the first graphic story nominated that’s not from the “Big Two” (American publishers Marvel and DC, representing multimedia conglomerates Disney and Time Warner, respectively), nor based on a licensed sf property from another medium, nor Girl Genius or Schlock Mercenary. Breakthrough? I guess.

Grandville seems to be from the “kitchen sink” tradition of throwing together a lot of varied tropes and hoping that something original comes out. The setting is alternate history/steampunk: Britain lost the Napoleonic Wars, and is just coming out of a near-two-century French occupation. This has somehow led to a late Victorian/art nouveau aesthetic and lots of clunky steam-powered machiney…and blimps! The story is political thriller/Sherlock Holmes/noir. And, most of the characters are anthropomorphic animals in the style of a nineteenth-century French cartoonist. Sometimes I felt like Bryan Talbot was trying to say something with these odd juxtapositions. Most of the time, I got the feeling that he just thought they were cool.

Scotland Yard Detective and Sherlockian badger Archie LeBrock is on the case when his arch-enemy, a former British resistance fighter and all around psycho, escapes on the way to the gallows. Archie descends into a gritty underworld to discover his whereabouts and how he escaped, and on the way, he uncovers a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top! Don’t they always?

I did find this story rather predictable, and the character designs rather pointless. The art is interesting – there’s a lot of richness in the backgrounds, and the storytelling is fantastic. That said, there was an angularity to the character designs that I found a bit off-putting. And, overall, I think it either needs to be prettier to hammer home the cartoonish quality of the characters, or it needs to be uglier to fit the gritty style of the story. Instead, it sits somewhere awkwardly in between.

This is a fine, but somewhat clichéd story with interesting, but flawed art. I liked it better than some of the perennial nominees, but I don’t think it’s the cure to what ails this category.

Grade: B-

1996 Hugo and Locus – THE DIAMOND AGE by Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite authors. His 1992 novel Snow Crash, a hyperbolic, hyperactive cyberpunk novel set in a future where the state has crumbled, is probably his most famous work, but it didn’t win any of the awards I’m covering. This is probably for the best, since I don’t think it’s a great novel. It’s funny, exciting, fun, and interesting, but it’s also silly, ridiculous and swerves erratically between over-the-top action scenes and infodumps about Sumerian religion. Every novel since has won an award though (apparently, Locus readers adore Neal Stephenson), so I get to talk about him a lot.

The Diamond Age is Stephenson’s one Hugo win. The novel is an homage to Charles Dickens’ class-oriented Victorian fiction, but it takes place in a future world dominated by nanotechnology. Matter compilers can create just about anything a person could need or want, but it’s an expensive and potentially deadly technology – sentinels have to protect people from deadly nano-viruses and the majority of the world’s population still have to toil to afford their basic necessities. Meanwhile, a select few live with immense wealth, but to protect that wealth they congregate in “tribes” that enforce social order. The action in this novel takes place in Hong Kong where the Han tribe dominate, though there is also an enclave of Neo-Victorians. The Neo-Victorians have retreated to the strict social mores and class deference of 19^th century Britain to bring order to the modern world.

The leader of the Neo-Victorians, Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, commissions an amazing educational text that combines nano-technology, sophisticated interactive software, and live remote actors to give his granddaughter a well-rounded understanding of the world, morality, and her own emotions. When its creator is mugged, the book accidentally ends up in the hands of a very young, abused working-class girl named Nell. The rest of the novel follows Nell’s education and mimics the style of enlightenment novels (which obsessed over the idea of education and what we would call “nature or nurture”). As always with Stephenson, there’s a variety of entertaining side stories, including my favorite involving a Neo-Confucian judge. There’s also a secret society of hackers trying to bring down the hierarchical social order that has evolved.

The ending is the one point where the novel seems to fall down a bit (a common problem for Stephenson), but this is a fantastic and original novel, especially the portions involving Nell or Judge Dee. Highly recommended.

Grade: A

The Steampunk Wars

I've been following, and enjoying, this debate for the past six weeks or so.

Charles Stross got the ball rolling with an attack on steampunk in October:

But there's a dark side as well. We know about the real world of the era steampunk is riffing off. And the picture is not good. If the past is another country, you really wouldn't want to emigrate there. Life was mostly unpleasant, brutish, and short; the legal status of women in the UK or US was lower than it is in Iran today: politics was by any modern standard horribly corrupt and dominated by authoritarian psychopaths and inbred hereditary aristocrats: it was a priest-ridden era that had barely climbed out of the age of witch-burning, and bigotry and discrimination were ever popular sports: for most of the population starvation was an ever-present threat. I could continue at length. It's the world that bequeathed us the adjective "Dickensian", that gave us a fully worked example of the evils of a libertarian minarchist state, and that provoked Marx to write his great consolatory fantasy epic, The Communist Manifesto. It's the world that gave birth to the horrors of the Modern, and to the mass movements that built pyramids of skulls to mark the triumph of the will. It was a vile, oppressive, poverty-stricken and debased world and we should shed no tears for its passing (or the passing of that which came next).

I think Stross is maybe a tad harsh and probably misses a few very good counterexamples, but his argument did resonate with a lot of what I thought after reading Boneshaker:

Steampunk really is more of an aesthetic than a subgenre . . . everything is in service to the visuals . . . . Steampunk scenarios so often miss the obvious opportunities to explore the real history in their settings while getting distracted by the scenery.

I also think Stross overstates the differences between the Victorian world and our own, however. There's no question that there are major differences, and that billions of people have greater access to the rights and stuff of the modern world, but I do think we're still living in that modern world that the Victorians made. My favorite counter to Stross (I haven't read them all), is by Jean-Christophe Valtat, and he makes much the same point:

It is very naive to think that we are through with the 19th century: it is, in many respects, a nightmare we haven't quite woken up from. Most of what we experience today - in urban life that is - has its origins in the 19th century. I always find it fascinating to think of a time where the things we are used to, and pretend to be adapted to, were felt for the first time: huge capitalist production and commodification, enormous cities and crowds, speed, networking, mass media, the rise of a visual culture, unprecedented destruction in warfare etc... And what makes it more interesting is that it all fell on dazzled, unprepared brains. The impact of this mode of life on the nervous system and the way that people tried to shield themselves from it (self-mechanization, neuroses, alcool, drugs etc...) were analyzed and debated instead of simply regarded as normal. It could be one of the ambitions to steampunk to go back to the source of the life we live and, by exploring those "first times," try to make our times a bit clearer for ourselves.

Finally, I wanted to post this today after reading the finest summation of the debate yet, by Henry Farrell. Farrell discusses Cosma Shalizi's notion that the Industrial Revolution was a singularity, and points out a couple of excellent steampunk works that Stross missed:

The two books which really brought steampunk to a wider audience – William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’sThe Difference Engine and Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Both of these are unabashed exercises in sociological speculation, which use nineteenth century forms to explore modern anxieties. Gibson and Sterling’s book is indeed arguably a Singularity novel as well as steampunk – but the singularity is the emergence of an unusually baroque form of the ‘vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, “the coldest of all cold monsters.”

Check it out for yourselves.

Anyway, I think the upshot of all of this is that I must read Felix Gilman's Half-Made World, posthaste!

I'm on a posting frenzy this week. There must be grading I'm trying to avoid...

1986 Philip K. Dick Award - HOMUNCULUS by James Blaylock

I don't plan on reviewing a lot of Philip K. Dick award winners - to their credit, they tend to nominate very different books from the general pool of a half-dozen-or-so books that all of the other awards seem to draw from (Neuromancer being an obvious exception). This fits in very nicely with Dick's avant garde writing, but many of the winners are not the widely-read, acknowledged classics that I'm focusing on for the moment. Blaylock, however, is a writer that has been on my to read list for a few years now. As I've mentioned before, I'm very interested in the steampunk aesthetic, and Blaylock, with this novel in particular, is among the subgenre's founding fathers (along with Moorcock, K. W. Jeter, and Tim Powers*).

Homunculus takes place in London in 1870 and follows a series of mad scientists led by Langdon St. Ives called the Trismigestus Club who hang out in a tobacco shop and contend with, well, even madder scientists like Dr Ignancio Narbono, who can revive the dead. An alchemist named Birdlove mastered perpetual motion and incorporated it into the engine of a blimp, which has circled the world for years since. The blimp's orbit has been slowly decaying, and since it contains all sorts of curiosities, including a small alien who may or may not be the father of an evangelist named Shiloh, the scientists attempt to unravel its mysteries and intercept it's landing.

Well, that's part of the plot. There are many more characters and there's quite a bit more going on. Too much, to be honest. As I've said before, steampunk is more an aesthetic than anything else, and many of the steampunk novels I've read are more interested in throwing out weird devices and comic anachronisms than developing plot or character. That's certainly the case here. The plot consists of a lot of scientists and their henchmen running around, spying on and stealing important items from each other. The characters are all very interchangeable - they have mechanistic motivations ("I need to get item x" or "speak with character y"), but no real emotions. Honestly, I had a hard time keeping track of them. I enjoyed a lot of the ideas here, but most of the novel left me cold, and I was glad it was a short one.


*I considered reviewing the first PKD winner, Powers' Anubis Gates. I read the novel in high school. I remember it, but not well enough to review it, and I enjoyed it, but not enough to reread it, so I'm skipped it in favor of Blaylock.

Grade: B-

2010 Hugo nominee (and Nebula winner), novella: The Women of Nell Gwynne's by Kage Baker (Subterranean)

Kage Baker’s been one of the most highly regarded sf writers of the past decade, and her Company series has been on my reading list for some time. Unfortunately, she died earlier this year of cancer at the age of 57.

The Women of Nell Gwynne’s was one of her last works. It’s a limited edition illustrated novella, and it’s already won the Nebula. Wikipedia has it as a standalone Company story, but I have no idea how it connects.

Basically, it’s a story of steampunk cyborg superspy Victorian prostitutes. How’s that for a pitch? We begin with the origin story of one of the operatives, the aristocratic Lady Beatrice. After being raped and brutalized in the Afghan War, Beatrice is cast out of her family as a fallen woman. She turns to prostitution to survive, and, since she’s fierce, resourceful, and educated, she’s recruited by the brothel called Nell Gwynne’s, which is really an intelligence gathering operation of the mysterious Gentlemen’s Speculative Society. The Society has a lot of steampunk spying technology, which they share with the girls in a scene straight out of James Bond. The rest of the novella focuses on a single mission concerning more steampunk super-technology.

It’s a very entertaining story, though I’m not sure it quite lives up to its potential. The mission itself is a bit routine – again, it’s straight Bond or Avengers material, despite the unique setting, and the girls don’t get to make that much use of their special equipment and talents. There’s also not as much exploration of sex and class as the beginning seems to promise. The relationship between the Society and Nell Gwynne’s seems rather exploitative, for instance, and I’d like to see more on that dynamic. It’s good, and I’d recommend it to steampunk fans especially, but I can’t help thinking that it could have been more. I look forward to reading more of Baker’s work though.

Since it was issued as a limited edition book, it’s not easy to get hold of at the moment (I’ve becoming a supporting WorldCon member, so I got a .pdf copy as a voter). It will receive a larger print run this fall though.

Grade: B

2010 Hugo nominee, graphic fiction: Girl Genius, Volume 9: "Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm" by Kaja and Phil Foglio

As I mentioned before, the Hugo voters seem to differ somewhat in their views from the voters of the big comics awards like the Eisners. This is only the second year that the graphic fiction category has existed, but based on these two sets of nominees, it looks like the Hugo pool leans heavily on high profile Vertigo series (Fables), properties from creators already well-known in the sf community (Cornell and Gaiman), and webcomics. I think the high profile of the latter category actually speaks in favor of Hugo nominators, as webcomics have huge circulation but often seem to be undervalued by comics tastemakers.

Phil Foglio has a couple of fan-art Hugos under his belt from way back in the ‘70s, and Girl Genius, by he and his wife Kaja, was one of the first self-published comics to embrace the webcomics model with great success. So, it’s not a surprise that Girl Genius is a mainstay in this category (it won the first year). It’s also very easy to see why Girl Genius has a huge following and active sf fanbase from the content itself: the character cartooning is lively and expressive with strong storytelling, the designs are fantastic, and the setting is very interesting. Girl Genius is set in an alternate nineteenth-century Europe where certain people have a “spark” that enables them to become mad scientists and create giant destructive machines. This has turned the Europe of this super-industrial revolution into a shattered war-zone full of giant robots. The titular “girl genius,” Agatha Heterodyne eventually discovers that she has a hidden “spark” and a special destiny. It’s all very steampunk, though the Foglios prefer the much cooler term “Gaslamp fantasy.”

This volume and the previous Hugo-winning volume both take place in a sentient castle that Agatha has inherited. Both volumes involve a lot of traipsing around the huge building while disarming of boobytraps, discovering secrets, and repelling invasions. The innovation of this volume in particular is that it puts both of Agatha’s love interests in the castle with her, which creates lots of comic and character opportunities, and, when a chromatic illness is introduced, adds a race-against-time element with some added drama. For these reasons, I liked this volume better than the previous one.

That said, I don’t think volume 8 should have won last year (I probably would have voted for Fables), and I’m not sure this superior volume should win this year either. The plot has stalled out a bit in the castle, after a series of very fast-paced entries through the first seven volumes. Also, as much as I can see why the series is so beloved, I’ve never been as big a fan. There’s a lot to admire here, and Phil and Kaja Foglio have great ideas and a lot of experience. It’s purely a matter of personal taste, but the mix of comedy and drama has never quite worked for me. I want the series to either be sillier or more serious. Still, I don’t think there’s any question that it’s the best “gaslamp fantasy” comic that America has produced in the past few years, and, in a year when Steampunk reigns supreme, that counts for a lot.

2010 Hugo nominee, Dramatic Pres. Short: Doctor Who: "The Next Doctor" Written by Russell T Davies; Directed by Andy Goddard (BBC Wales)

I’m a rather late convert to the Doctor Who revival, and the franchise in general, but I have been voraciously devouring new and classic episodes for the past year or so. After four seasons of Hugo-dominating, high quality television, the new series took a year to say goodbye to star David Tennant with a series of five holiday specials – two years of Christmas specials, an Easter special, a New Year’s Special, and….um…Guy Fawkes Day? Three of them were eligible for this round of Hugos, and, despite being fairly poorly received by a lot of fans, all three received nominations.

There are two big things going on in this special. First, it’s a very steampunk story that has the Doctor fighting Cybermen in Victorian London at Christmas. We get giant robots with gears, powered by Dickensian child labor! At the same time, we have an odd twist on the old “mulit-doctor story.” If you’re not all that familiar with the show, the Doctor has been played by eleven different actors (and that’s just canon!). Since he is a time traveler, it’s not too hard to do a story where he hangs out with different versions of himself. This has happened three different times on the show proper (but not for twenty-five years), and some more in telethon specials and in audio plays. In this special, we’re teased with the twist that Tennant’s Doctor is meeting a future version of himself played by David Morissey. It doesn’t quite work out that way, but it’s a fun idea.

So, steampunk, multiple doctors, bigger budget special – it all sounds good. Why the disappointment? I actually don’t have a great answer for this one, other than, it’s just not as crisp and exciting as the best Doctor Who always is. There are a couple of chase scenes, a big setpiece with the aforementioned giant robot, and lots of scenes of Morissey and Tennant chatting, but there’s not much going on underneath. Writer Russell T. Davies tries to do something with the villain being a woman of ill-repute, motivated by oppressive Victorian society…but there’s not much depth to that either. And, it’s a bit twee at times – instead of the Doctor’s usual TARDIS, a time travelling police box, the Victorian Doctor has the Tethered Aerial Release Developed In Style, a hot air balloon TARDIS. It’s not horrible, but it’s not up to the high standards of the show at its best, and it’s not Hugo-worthy either.

Grade: B-

2010 Hugo (and Nebula) nominee, novel: BONESHAKER by Cherie Priest

There’s a one word description for this novel that I think is very appropriate, and I hope people don’t think it too cruel: cute. Boneshaker is cute.

Boneshaker takes place in an alternate 1880, in an apocalyptic Seattle. Fifteen years earlier, a mad scientist named Leviticus Blue created a massive mining machine called the Boneshaker (in our reality, the name of a bicycle from about the same time). A test of the machine went horribly wrong and caused earthquakes that devastated the city and unleashed a horrible gas that citizens call “blight.” When the blight gas gets into people’s bloodstreams, through inhalation or other means, they turn into rampaging zombies. As a result, a massive wall was built around the city of Seattle to contain the zombie menace.

The novel focuses on Leviticus Blue’s surviving wife, Briar, and their son Zeke. The rebellious teenage Zeke decides to sneak into the city to learn about the fate of his father, and Briar goes to look for him on an airship run by pirates/drug-traffickers.

As a historian who works in this period, I do have a love/hate relationship with steampunk. I love that the novels tend to capture the sprawling and busy multiculturism of the nineteenth century in ways that most historical fiction ignores (after the first 50 pages, I was afraid Priest was using a lily-white cast, which would be pretty ridiculous in 1880 Seattle, but she soon introduced the diversity I expected). I also love the industrial aesthetic. On the other hand, steampunk really is more of an aesthetic than a subgenre; I often feel that everything is in service to the visuals. For instance, Priest takes time to explain that people need to wear goggles with polarized lenses to see the blight gas. Does this lead to a dramatic scene where a character loses their goggles, and finds them only to learn that they’re surrounded by blight? No. Is there some alternate history to explain why polarized lenses were invented 60 years early in this world? No. In fact, it never really comes up again, but it does mean that all of the characters are always wearing cool goggles. I’m probably nitpicking here, but it does bother me that steampunk scenarios so often miss the obvious opportunities to explore the real history in their settings while getting distracted by the scenery.

The novel also feels a bit too trendy. Steampunk is hot now with it airships and mad scientists. Zombies are also hot now, with hit films and their invasion of the western canon (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). This steampunk versus zombies scenario is capturing something in the zeitgeist…but I’m not sure it will be as well-regarded when popular geek-taste moves along.

It is a well-told tale though. Briar and Zeke are likable, compelling characters, and the world was fun. There’s plenty of violence and darkness, but it’s really all in service of the steampunk/zombie aesthetic and the loving mother-son relationship at the center. It’s cute. And, a cute book certainly can win the Hugo award; it happened last year with Gaiman’s Graveyard Book. Do I think a cute novel should win the Hugo Award? I guess it depends on the competition.

Grade: B