On Love, Hate, and Steampunk: Cherie Priest’s <em>Boneshaker</em>

I ought to hate steampunk. The snob in me thinks any fandom that attracts people who express themselves by dressing weird is simultaneously admirable and worthy of derision. I want to be different, so I’m going to go join these other people and we’re all going to wear corsets and goggles and be unique together. Sigh.

I’ve also been trained from an early age to despise the anachronism that makes steampunk tick. Every family vacation I’ve ever been on involves a visit to a historical site or museum, where my mother proceeds to tell the docents what they got wrong. I used to find it embarrassing, but in this regard, I have become my mother – last month, I texted her from Mount Vernon, looking for someone, anyone, to agree with me that the reproduction Chippendale-style dresser upstairs was just gauche.

Secretly, I love steampunk. Perhaps it’s the last, dying embers of my rebellion against my mother, but I love the idea of alternate history that mashes up time, and science, and history, and magic, and, most of all, gets the objects all wrong. Every piece of steampunk I consume is an affirmation that not everything has to be right all the time.

My latest steampunk consumption, Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, has brought a new dimension to this love/hate relationship with steampunk. While there’s a lot to love about the novel, it just didn’t immediately hit my literary sweet spot, and I’ve spent the better part of the past two weeks trying to figure out why.

Warning: There be spoilers here, and not just for Boneshaker. Proceed at your own risk.

What I Should Love About Boneshaker

A swashbuckling retro sci-fi novel with a female protagonist, set in the 19th century Northwest? I should be all over this book, and I haven’t even gotten to the zombies yet.

It’s the objects that sold me on this book. I love the descriptions of the objects, like the static electricity-powered sonic cannon, the gas and electric lightbulbs, and the cyborg arm. Throw in some dirigibles, and I should be a happy, happy girl.

Objects are what make me love steampunk, in spite of myself. I love the idea of subverting the material culture of the 19th century through anachronism. There’s something about that subversion that feels like a celebration of those materials – the brass fittings and oiled valves, the springs and clockwork mechanisms, the goggles and lab aprons of the tinkerers who create them. It’s the anachronism – the fact that these objects shouldn’t be able to do their work in this time – that hooks me into these beautiful, beautiful objects. Because if we can subvert the objects, as Cherie Priest says, we can subvert the history:

But with its time-travel/history-altering underpinnings, steampunk has the capacity to un-write some of the rules that created the Other in the first place. It offers a voice to those who were marginalized, allowing them to stand up and say, “I was here. And I absolutely, defiantly reject the implication that I wasn’t.” It’s open to everyone — including those whose historical representation got left out, written out or killed out of hand.

I like that Priest seems to have this goal of openness in mind with the Clockwork Century series – the next volume, Clementine, will presumably follow Croggon Hainey, pirate airship captain and minor character in Boneshaker. The fact that Hainey and his crew are African-American speaks to Priest’s un-writing of rules, as do the women in Boneshaker: Briar Wilkes, who sets off over the wall to find her son in the land of zombies, hitching a ride on a pirate airship; Lucy, the saloon operator with an arm of brass (as opposed to the usual heart of gold); and the Native American Princess Angelina, who is nothing if not a clutch performer. Add the underground Chinese community, represented most fully by Huey, the resident tinkerer, throw in some subtle class commentary and swashbuckling action, and there’s a lot to love about this book.

So why didn’t I love it? Why is my internal bookometer stuck firmly on “like,” with nary a twitter in the direction of “love”?

It’s the Zombies, Stupid

I’ve been on a zombie kick recently. I’m kind of obsessed with zombies as a metaphor for consumerism, the rise of zombie stories in conjunction with the rise of film and television, and the zombie renaissance that seems to have accompanied the rise of the internet (Mira Grant’s Newsflesh Trilogy is a great example of that particular zeitgeist at work), to the point that I don’t even care how pretentious that sounds or if someone else has said it first.

What I’ve learned from reading and watching zombie stories is this: the zombies are us, and they have be us in order to really be scary. In order for zombies to inspire the pity and fear that Aristotle talks about (and zombies are all about tragedy), a character the reader/viewer really cares about has to get turned into a zombie. A good zombie story requires sacrifice.

Boneshaker doesn’t make that sacrifice, at least not on a personal level. Sure, a minor, minor character (who has four lines, two of which are “Well,” (Priest 225) and “Yes, ma’am” (226)) gets turned, but it wasn’t anywhere near as scary as it would have been if, say, Lucy or Swakhammer or Rudy had been zombified (and Rudy deserved it). I can’t really fault Priest for the first two – I didn’t want to give up Lucy or Swakhammer either – and it’s hard to blame her for not definitively turning Rudy, knowing I’d probably be complaining about how obvious a choice it was if she did. I have to respect the fact that she didn’t go the easy route on that one. Ultimately, I also have to respect the fact that Priest sacrificed not just one character, but an entire city, to the zombies.

I don’t think the lack of personal sacrifice is even what really bothers me about the zombies. Despite my insistence on zombies as a contemporary pop metaphor, I’m fine with their temporal relocation – hell, it lets me fanwank on Voudou for a while, so that’s cool. What really ticks me off is that they’re very nearly the sum total of the Things that Can Only Be Explained by Magic in the novel, and they get only a bit part, serving as obstacles to be overcome or weapons of war. They are, in a sense, objectified, and this makes them just about the steampunkiest objects in the book.

Things that Can Only Be Explained by Magic

The places where I really can’t resist steampunk – the TV shows, movies, and comics that use their elements well – are full of magic. Sure, a lot of the gadgets on Warehouse 13 are scientifically plausible – the Tesla stun gun, the Farnsworth video cell phone – those are the objects that got me hooked into the show, with their steampunk styling and allusions to famous tinkerers. But then they throw in Lewis Carroll’s mirror, Harry Houdini’s wallet, Edgar Allan Poe’s pen, and some purple goo, and suddenly, it’s all about magic. The magic is what makes it make sense.

The same is true for the steampunk objects in The Vampire Diaries (groan if you must), which are what got me really and truly hooked into watching that show. 19th-century tinkerer Jonathan Gilbert’s inventions – the vampire-detecting pocket watch, the vampire-controlling clockwork music box – turn out to be useless on their own. Their power comes from the spells wrought by Emily Bennet, an enslaved witch who works in secret, so that Gilbert can take the credit. Cherie Priest would like the way those objects, and the show, unwrite the rules of Othering. It doesn’t get much more steampunk than that, and yet the magic is what makes them work.

As much as I love Terry Gilliam and really like Hayao Miyazaki, City of Lost Children is still my favorite film with steampunk elements. The styling is steampunk at its darkest and most beautiful, from the Gaultier costumes to the cyborg synaesthetic eyes and assorted gadgetry. Most of these objects seem plausible, or at least pseudo-scientific (see the brain in vat of green liquid), but the most important of these objects, the dream-stealing device used by the mad scientist Krank, is so implausible as to Only Be Explained by Magic. This makes sense in a fable about the magic of children’s dreams. The magic is what the story’s about.

Warren Ellis’s Captain Swing, Ignition City, and Aetheric Mechanics are all about the steampunk (or dieselpunk, or whatever), but I haven’t gotten to (or all the way through) them yet. My favorite appearance of steampunk elements in the work I have read, in the webcomic FreakAngels, is probably the most restrained, if a little bit tongue-in-cheek:  FreakAngel KK is, literally, a steam punk. She’s styled steampunk, in corsets, fishnets, and weird tubes jutting from her miniskirted hips, but she also builds machines that run on steam. Somehow, I’m never entirely sure that KK’s not keeping that steam-powered motorcycle/helicopter in the air with her brain. Even the most plausible explanation for the steam chopper (that she invented it, and it works, for real) relies on KK’s FreakAngel abilities, which allowed her to absorb her vast knowledge of the mechanics of steam (and punch a hole in the world – mustn’t forget that). The magic in FreakAngels comes from these abilities. It’s the magic – much, much more than the steam – that moves the story.

My favorite piece of steampunk, Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, is all about magic -  the literary sleight-of-hand involved in mashing up fictional characters (all of them), settings (The Nautilus), and events (the Martian invasion from War of the Worlds) in Victorian London (and, more recently, mid-20th century London) is simply mind-boggling. The entire premise of that work is that it Can Only Be Explained by Magic, and its magic comes from allusion, most consistently to H.G. Wells. Sure, Captain Nemo and the Nautilus are there to provide steampunk styling and allusions to Jules Verne, and there are characters borrowed from other Victorian writers, but the events are driven primarily by Wells’ creations, creations which Can Only Be Explained by Magic.

Boneshaker, on the other hand, is almost entirely steam-powered. The gadgets are almost all plausible – folks were making dirigibles in that time period, and accelerating their development has become something of a steampunk convention; the Daisy Dooser (sonic cannon) seems to be powered by a Tesla coil, which makes sense; the bellows and smokestack-like towers of the underground air circulation system are a nice nod to the architecture of industrialism in that period; even the steam-powered Boneshaker machine seems scientifically conceivable.

Lucy’s cyborg arm is really the only gadget that isn’t plausible in that time period: though the construction of the arm fits right into the period, I was never quite sure how it worked. Lucy is pretty clear about how the arm connects to her body – “it’s bolted onto my bones” – but how her mind controls the movements of the arm is left a mystery (“He didn’t tell me, either, how he planned to make it work” (262).). It’s more than a century later, and we’re still working on getting brains to connect to and control prosthetics – if Lucy has a functioning cyborg arm in the 1880s, it Can Only Be Explained by Magic, but it’s a little bit less magical, and more plausible, for reflecting modern advances in prosthesis (such as attaching prosthetic limbs to bones with titanium screws).

Which brings me back to the zombies as the only Things that Can Only Be Explained by Magic, that magic taking the form of blight gas, a thick yellow fog that turns folks into zombies (Priest calls them “rotters”) in large doses and gets them high in smaller doses. Said blight gas is the direct consequence of the Boneshaker machine’s rampage, and it feels like a curse. I’m used to steampunk where magic allows devices to work, stretching possibility to create something new. I’m comfortable with magic being a good, or at least a useful, thing. In Boneshaker, magic is the consequence of the  devices at work, and that magic is ugly. It creates obstacles. It hurts instead of helping. It’s scary.

This depiction of magic is pretty consistent in Priest’s Clockwork Century universe: in the short story “Tanglefoot,” magic is a direct consequence of the tinkering wrought by an orphan boy. The automaton he builds becomes possessed and wreaks havoc, a chain of events eerily similar to the events that set up Boneshaker, in which inventor Leviticus Blue’s out-of-control Boneshaker machine releases the blight gas that turns Seattle into the land of zombies.

Damn. I think the bookometer just moved.

As much as I want to hate the lack of magic in Boneshaker, I find myself loving the way Priest is using magic. Magic should be scary. Boneshaker‘s magic emphasizes horror in the genre mash-up that is steampunk, and when I think about it, all of the steampunk I can’t resist is really about horror, from Warehouse 13′s cursed objects to the distorted dream-state of City of Lost Children, with vampires and world-breaking freaks thrown in for fun. In this respect, Boneshaker is also very much like the steampunk I truly love - not for nothing does Alan Moore include Mr. Hyde, Wilhemina Murray, and Dr. Moreau. Horror is tied into steampunk’s lineage, perhaps even more so than magic.

The Parent Trap

Steampunk goes back to the 19th century because that’s where science fiction starts, with Jules Verne and Mary Shelley and H.G. Wells. Referencing those three writers is deliberate, from the Jules Verne styling of the objects to the Frankenstein-like inventors, who reach farther than they should, but still manage to hold our sympathies for their effort. Those references also serve a larger purpose, and here’s where I really want to love steampunk: it’s all about reconciling the science, represented by Jules Verne, with the magic of fantasy, represented by Shelley and Wells. Steampunk is a child of divorce, begging its parents to get back together. As a reader, I can’t help but to feel its pain, even as I acknowledge the reasons Wells gives for the split:

These tales have been compared with the work of Jules Verne and there was a disposition on the part of literary journalists at one time to call me the English Jules Verne. As a matter of fact there is no literary resemblance whatever between the anticipatory inventions of the great Frenchman and these fantasies. His work dealt almost always with the actual possibilities of invention and discovery, and he made some remarkable forecasts . . . But these stories of mine . . . do not pretend to deal with possible things; they are exercises of the imagination in a quite different field. They belong to a class of writing which includes the Golden Ass of Apuleius, the True Histories of Lucian, Peter Schemil, and the story of Frankenstein . . . They are all fantasies; they do not aim to project a serious possibility; they aim indeed only at the same amount of conviction as one gets in a good gripping dream (qtd. in Mac Adam xiv).

In other words, it’s not you, science, it’s me. Now leave me to my fantasies. It’s pretty clear that H.G. Wells won the custody battle (though Verne reserves visitation rights) where Alan Moore is concerned, but Boneshaker reminds me of the third parent, serving as a literary shout-out to her influence.

Mary Shelley

Like its literary progeny, Frankenstein mashes genres, combining Gothic horror and Romanticism to create science fantasy, as Wells might call it. I’ve always thought of it as a fable about parenting, with Victor Frankenstein as the ultimate dead-beat dad. It’s a cautionary tale about reaching too high, too fast, and the moral is clear: here’s what happens when you don’t worry enough about being a good parent. Victor is too selfish, too egotistical to worry about trifles like responsibility and parenting; he creates, but fails to hold himself accountable to or for his creation.

Boneshaker, like Frankenstein, is the story of a child seeking out his absent father. Zeke Wilkes travels behind the wall, into Seattle, hoping to find his presumed-dead father, inventor Leviticus Blue. Like Victor Frankenstein’s monster, he is looking for answers from his creator, a man who, if we are to believe the heroine, is just as egotistical as Frankenstein and quite a bit more selfish. This is a man who, like Frankenstein,  creates without a care for the consequences, which ravage not only the creator’s own life (and the lives of those he holds dear), but an entire city. One gets the feeling that, had Leviticus Blue been around for Zeke’s birth, he would have been a terrible parent. He just wouldn’t have worried about it enough.

By contrast, the heroine of Boneshaker, Briar Wilkes, worries too much about being a good parent. It’s not overstatement to say that she obsesses about her parenting skills throughout the novel, though her worry is understandable: what parent whose child runs away from home wouldn’t worry about her parenting skills? Still, the doubt she constantly seems to be vocalizing feels like the equivalent of “do these jeans make me look fat?”; it’s a question asked so that the reader can reassure herself that Briar is, indeed, a good mother, by virtue of having doubted herself in the first place. By the time all of Briar’s secrets are revealed, it’s a reassurance the reader needs.

Maybe I’m a bit sensitive to this kind of self-flagellation, but when NPR is telling me about women who write books about feeling like a bad parent, and the best parent I know is posting “parenting fail” updates to her Facebook feed, I start to wonder if maybe Shelley and Priest aren’t commenting on gendered approaches to parenting and self-doubt.

Boneshaker has me wondering: do women worry more about parenting? Not are they better parents, but do they worry more? I know from experience that the “you’re a terrible parent! It’s your fault I’m so screwed up!” guilt trip always got way more mileage on my mom than my dad – was I unconsciously aware that this would work on my mom because of her gender socialization? I don’t mean to suggest that men don’t also worry about being good parents – Kenzaburo Oe and Harry Chapin have convinced me that they do – but do women worry more? More to the point, why is this? Am I OK with this?

Damn. The bookometer just moved again. Any book that can make me ask those questions is full of love.

Works Cited

Mac Adam, Alfred. “Realist of the Fantastic.” Introduction. The Time Machine and The Invisible Man. By H.G. Wells. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003. Print.

Priest, Cherie. Boneshaker. New York: Tor, 2009. Print.

—-. “Steampunk: What it is, why I came to like it, and why I think it’ll stick around.” The Clockwork Century. 8 August 2009. Web. 30 May 2010.

Note: The bookometer was inspired by the illustrations at Hyperbole and a Half, which are way better than mine. The Alot Is Better than You at Everything is required reading.