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LESSON 5: Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

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LESSON 5: Boneshaker by Cherie Priest LESSON 5: Boneshaker by Cherie Priest On the forum, I gave you the following assignment: Read the first 5 pages of Boneshaker by Cherie Priest. List the Steampunk elements you find. Then list the ESSENTIAL Steampunk genre elements, and then the Character descriptions, then setting Your chart will look something like this: STEAMPUNK ...................... ESSENTIAL ...................CHARACTER ...........SETTING ELEMENTS ......................... ELEMENTS.....................ELEMENTS...............ELEMENTS black overcoat black overcoat 11 crooked stairs 11 crooked stairs and so on you can find Boneshaker here at Amazon The table part didn’t come out very well so here’s a better version. I added the word “ALL” to the column labels because I wanted you to understand that in those columns I’m not looking for any specific elements other than those labeled. For instance, under “CHARACTER ELEMENTS (ALL)” give all the character elements you find, not just elements pertaining to the Steampunk genre. STEAMPUNK ESSENTIAL CHARACTER SETTING ELEMENTS (ALL) STEAMPUNK ELEMENTS ELEMENTS (ALL) ELEMENTS (ALL) Black overcoat Black overcoat 11 crooked stairs 11 crooked stairs Goth, Gadgets & Grunge: Steampunk Stories with Style!© By Pat Hauldren LESSON 5: Boneshaker by Cherie Priest / 2 If you’ll notice on the link I provided for Boneshaker at Amazon.com, it’s listed as “ (Sci Fi Essential Books) “ and baby, that’s where *I* want to be! I couldn’t find a specific definition for exactly what that term meant at Amazon.com, but just from the term itself, you can tell it’s the list of books that, while aren’t classics yet, are becoming so for various reasons. This list of books includes Hunters of Dune by Brian Herbert and Keven J. Anderson, Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer, Ragamuffin by Tobias S. Buckell, The Last Green Tree by Jim Grimsley, The Works of H. Beam Piper by H. Beam Piper, Warbreaker by Brandson Sanderson, and many more. Books like this aren’t on the 100 Best Science Fiction List, but they might become so over time. This list of “best” made a certain impact on their genre/subgenre and Boneshaker by Cherie Priest is no exception. What’s the big deal about Boneshaker? Boneshaker is one of the most celebrated novels of the past few years and especially because it’s such a great novel written in the Steampunk subgenre. In fact, it’s got its own movie deal. “Hammer Films is making a movie of Cherie Priest's steampunk novel Boneshaker, with Cross Creek Pictures and Exclusive Media Group producing. The screenplay is being written by John Hilary Shepherd (Nurse Jackie). Like the book, the movie will take place an alternate 1880s Seattle, which has become a walled city overrun with "rotters," or zombies.” ~ says io9 The novel, published in 2009 by Tor Books, is the first in a series set in the period, which Priest has dubbed the “Clockwork Century.” Her second novel Dreadnought was published in 2010, and the third, Ganymede, in 2011, and Clementine in 2011 Her fourth, Fiddlehead, was released in 2013. According to Amazon, the book description reads: “ In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska’s ice. Thus was Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born. But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead. Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue’s widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenaged boy to support, but she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history. His quest will take him under the wall and into a city teeming with ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords, and heavily armed refugees. And only Briar can bring him out alive.” LESSON 5: Boneshaker by Cherie Priest / 3 Now that is interesting, at least to me, and so I did buy the book The Hugo Awards are a set of and it wasn’t a disappointment. awards given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy In this class, I’m not asking you to read the whole book. We are works and achievements of the taking snippets of different books over different times and in previous year. The awards are different sub/sub/subgenres and looking at the essential genre named after Hugo Gernsback, elements, the characters, the setting, the story, and the writing the founder of the pioneering along with writing style and comparing these to their success (or science fiction magazine lack thereof). Amazing Stories. Organized and overseen by the World Science What makes Boneshaker such a popular book? Fiction Society, the awards are “Ultimately, Steampunk is a chance to treat history as a given each year at the annual World Science Fiction playground. It's really a lot of fun. I tell people that really the only Convention as the central focus rule to it is that if you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong." of the event. ~ Wikipedia.org says Cherie Priest, an author of Steampunk novels who went to school in Chattanooga, moved to Seattle, and recently returned to St. Elmo. Boneshaker was nominated in 2010 for the Hugo Award for Best Novel and won the 2010 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Boneshaker has several things going for it. (Remember, this part is a lot opinion based on what I’ve read and researched.) Winners of the Locus Steampunk Award for Best Zombies (rotters) SF Novel, awarded by Alternate History the Locus magazine. American Civil War The Locus Awards are Gold Rush/Klondikes presented to winners Wild West of Locus Magazine's annual Dystopic lifestyle (of Leviticus Blue’s family after the readers' poll, which was Boneshaker destroyed their town) established in the early '70s Blue-collar workers (esp. the wife, Briar) specifically to provide recommendations and Strong Female Character (Briar works full time and raises a suggestions to Hugo Awards st son alone, how 21 century is that? ) voters. Over the decades the Indian Princess Locus Awards have often drawn more voters than the I’m sure that’s not ALL the stuff it has going for it, but those are the Hugos and Nebulas genre/subgenre items I could recount (with the help of Wikipedia ). combined. In recent years Locus Awards are presented So, it’s Steampunk, which attracts a much wider audience than mere at an annual banquet, and Science Fiction or straight Fantasy or the label of Alternate History. It’s unlike any other award, all those things rolled together, dusted with rotters and dystopia and explicitly honor publishers of Indians and the gold rush and a strong female character and some winning works with damned good writing and voila! We have a New York Times certificates. ~ locusmag.com Bestseller! On Boneshaker writing What did you think of Priest’s writing style and writing in general? Did you enjoy reading it? Did you find the writing well done or a chore to read? LESSON 5: Boneshaker by Cherie Priest / 4 How much about the story can you tell just from page one? LESSON 5: Boneshaker by Cherie Priest / 5 Character/Setting: She’s wearing a “dull black overcoat” so she’s not your usual or typical image of a female, no matter what you think typical is. Character/Relationship: She has someone who gets into trouble, Zeke, which at this point is probably her son (we don’t know that yet.) Character/Relationship: She was really worried (about her son, Zeke) until the guy said “I was hoping we could talk about your father” then “Her shoulders lost their stiff, defensive right angles…” See her physical change? Character/Relationship: She’s been hurt by men. “I swear to God, all the men in my life…” and “My father was a tyrant, and everyone he loved was afraid of him.” Setting: She lives in a shanty town, “eleven crooked stairs to her home.” And “narrow porch” are our clues. So we can tell quite a lot just from her page one, yeah? This is called “front loading” – the amount of story material the author can put on page one, page 2, and so on without info dumping, telling, or boring the poor reader to death. How much can we tell about your story from YOUR page one? Discussion 1. Share your first page (approx. 13 lines) with us and tell us how much stuff you’ve front loaded into your story. Along with the first page text, you can share your details in a chart like the one we did above. a. If you don’t have anything written, use my rough draft of a short story (next page) and pretend it’s your first five pages (though you would write this MUCH better than I! ) 2. Share your chart that we filled out at the beginning of the lesson on Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker’s first five pages. (If you need me to supply the first five pages I can do that.) LESSON 5: Boneshaker by Cherie Priest / 6 Rough draft of an unnamed and unfinished short story: “I dare say. You’re indefinably crazy, you know that, right?” Horace cinched my belt, a little too tightly I thought, perhaps purposely, but how would he know? He couldn’t feel like flesh and blood.
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