Skip to main content

Cherie Priest, BONESHAKER


My reading list lately includes Cherie Priest's 2009 steampunk novel BONESHAKER. It is "steampunk" in that it has sci-fi elements and a Victorian setting. It is also an alternative-history novel (Stonewall Jackson survived his wound at Chancellorsville, and due to his tactical brilliance in subsequent campaigns the Union was incapable of bringing the civil war to a satisfactory conclusion -- it was still underway in the late 1870s.) There are zombies in this novel, (called "rotters"), there are humans who manage a wary co-existence with the rotters ("doorknobs"), there are dirigibles, a mysterious dead grandfather and an even more mysterious (probably dead) father: all good stuff.

The son/grandson of these two mysterious men is Ezekiel Blue, or Ezekiel Wilkes, [depending on point of view] or just Zeke. He goes in search of evidence that his father wasn't the evil man that he is generally held to be, or to have been, amongst the residents of the outskirts of Seattle.

The narration moves back and forth between Zeke's PoV and that of his mother, Briar Wilkes, the former wife of Levi Blue and the daughter of Willard Wilkes.

I'll just quote one brief snippet of dialogue in this post. Briar is talking to a doorknob named Swakhammer about yet another mysterious man, an inventor known as Minnericht. Swakhammer has informed her that some of his fellow doorknobs believe that Minnericht and Levi Blue are one and the same. Blue has "dressed up different and [is] wearing a new name."

Briar is walking through a tunnel with Swakhammer at this point -- never mind why. Briar finds the idea absurd. Given Levi's reputation [which I won't try to explain in this post], she says: "If you folks really thought he was Blue, you'd have dragged him into the street and fed him to the rotters by now."

Here's the neat bit. Swakhammer's reply and the bit of description that follows:

"Mind your step," he told her, indicating with the sweep of the lantern the way the tunnel was broken up into an uneven floor.

 I love it. Mind your CONVERSATIONAL step, saying stuff like that to me! That seems to be the message, until we get to Swakhammer's gesture with his lantern. And the two possible meanings of "mind your step" co-exist even when we do.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
7 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
13 comments
Read more