Blight in the PNW
Dec. 28th, 2021 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileFor plane reading on the way back from New York, I decided to settle into Cherie Priest’s steampunk doorstopper Boneshaker. It was a 45-minute flight but we did get to the airport stupid early, so it seemed necessary to start a 400-page novel. Fortunately, I enjoy big fat ridiculous steampunk novels here in the dark days of winter, and this one was pretty good!
It takes place in an alternate version of Seattle where Seattle has been quite substantially destroyed, and a big wall has been built around it to contain a mysterious contagion called the Blight. The Blight was started after a wacky inventor named Leviticus Blue who built a big mining rig at the behest of the Russians to dig gold in the Yukon, and instead took it on a joyride underneath Seattle and robbed all the banks.
Our dual protagonists here are Briar, Leviticus’ widow, and her fifteen-year-old son, Zeke. Zeke is curious about his dead family members, mainly his dad and his grandfather, a policeman who heroically jailbroke a bunch of people who had been left to die in the evacuation of Seattle. Briar doesn’t tell Zeke much of anything, so he rather predictably runs away and sneaks into the walled-up ruins of Seattle to go find things out. Briar, of course, goes after him, and thus commences several hundred pages of foggy, zombie-filled post-apocalyptic steampunk adventures featuring many dodgy but colorful characters and lots of gas masks and airships.
First of all I must say that reading a whole book about people who have to keep their masks on except under very specific closed circumstances, otherwise they shall catch the blight and die, is much more nerve-wracking to read now than it was when the book was written in 2009. On the other hand, at least the masks we have to wear aren’t full-head gas masks with goggles and seals and stuff.
I have absolutely nothing deep or insightful to say about this book whatsoever. It was a steampunk adventure book, and steampunk adventures it certainly did provide! If you want 400 pages of steampunk adventuriness I recommend it highly.
It takes place in an alternate version of Seattle where Seattle has been quite substantially destroyed, and a big wall has been built around it to contain a mysterious contagion called the Blight. The Blight was started after a wacky inventor named Leviticus Blue who built a big mining rig at the behest of the Russians to dig gold in the Yukon, and instead took it on a joyride underneath Seattle and robbed all the banks.
Our dual protagonists here are Briar, Leviticus’ widow, and her fifteen-year-old son, Zeke. Zeke is curious about his dead family members, mainly his dad and his grandfather, a policeman who heroically jailbroke a bunch of people who had been left to die in the evacuation of Seattle. Briar doesn’t tell Zeke much of anything, so he rather predictably runs away and sneaks into the walled-up ruins of Seattle to go find things out. Briar, of course, goes after him, and thus commences several hundred pages of foggy, zombie-filled post-apocalyptic steampunk adventures featuring many dodgy but colorful characters and lots of gas masks and airships.
First of all I must say that reading a whole book about people who have to keep their masks on except under very specific closed circumstances, otherwise they shall catch the blight and die, is much more nerve-wracking to read now than it was when the book was written in 2009. On the other hand, at least the masks we have to wear aren’t full-head gas masks with goggles and seals and stuff.
I have absolutely nothing deep or insightful to say about this book whatsoever. It was a steampunk adventure book, and steampunk adventures it certainly did provide! If you want 400 pages of steampunk adventuriness I recommend it highly.