Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

A character in the novel Clementine is said to have dreamed "of his own ship -- and of the clouds, drafts, and passages over the Rockies. He dreamed briefly of Seattle, the walled city filled with gas and peril, and of the giant Andan Cly who had tried to help retrieve the Free Crow when first it was stolen. He also dreamed of a skittering of black birds, shifting their weight back and forth on a tree branch, their tiny claws gripping and scrapping the wood." In the next paragraph we learn that the sound those birds were making was an intrusion into the dream of a real world event, one to which the dreamer awakens. There's a lot going on in this passage, and it's deftly done. Clementine is part of the Clockwork Century collection of novels by Cherie Priest. Its an alternate history based in part of the notion that dirigibles became a key means of transit across the North American continent in the second half of the 19th century, while the Civil War waged on...

I like the opening sentence of the steampunk novel DREADNOUGHT, by Cherie Priest. "Down in the laundry room with the bloody-wet floors and the ceiling-high stacks of sheets, wraps, and blankets, Vinita Lynch was elbows-deep in a vat full of dirty pillowcases because she's promised -- she'd sworn on her mother's life -- that she'd find a certain windup pocket watch belonging to Private Hugh Morton before the device was plunged into a tub of simmering soapy water and surely destroyed for good." There are several things to love about that sentence. There's the simple fact that it immerses you in an environment and in a story without any throat clearing. There's the layered way in which it does so, starting with "where" (in the laundry room), proceeding to "who" (Vinita Lynch), then "what" (she's looking for a watch) and finally "when" (before it is destroyed). Each of the first three of those layers gets...

What I especially like about the passage I quoted is the use of indirection. When Zeke identifies by name two of the three men in the room, he adds a third name with a note of inflection in his voice. We hear this from the PoV of Rector, as is the case throughout the novel. (This is in contrast to the earlier novel, in which the PoV swung back and forth between the two protagonists). Anyway, we draw the inference about Zeke's incomplete knowledge ourselves, and then read that Rector has done the same. So we our on the same page with our protagonist, so to speak. Only after that do we learn that Rector isn't sure he understood Zeke properly. He isn't sure who is who yet even as to the two names which Zeke pronounced with confidence. Yet it tells us something about Rector's developing state of mind -- as someone trying to free himself from the influence of a powerful drug -- that he notes his own uncertainty. He knows what he does not know. Finally, the brief passag...

I've blogged a bit recently here about BONESHAKER, a steampunk-fantasy novel by Cherie Priest, set in an alternative-history late 19th century Seattle and its outskirts. That novel set off her CLOCKWORK CENTURY series. Most of the other books in the series are only loosely related to BONESHAKER. They take place in other parts of the alt-history US, have little overlap in characters or plot with the original, etc. But THE INEXPLICABLES is a true sequel. We're back the northwest, mostly within the city wall (yes, in these stories there's a tall wall around Seattle, although enterprising folk can and do get in and out), and the character/plot overlap is large. The protagonist of THE INEXPLICABLES is Rector Sherman, a young man who has just been kicked out of the orphanage in the Outskirts of Seattle after having reached 18. He was a minor character in BONESHAKER. Rector is neither a hero nor an anti-hero, though somewhat closer to the latter than the former. He is a ...

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 th...