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.

Comments

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 maj...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

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 a...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog