Dreadnought

"Yes, it’s one of the few steampunk books I’ve read with a train in it. And of those, it’s one of only two that I love. It’s very much a Planes, Trains and Automobiles story. A Civil War nurse named Mercy Lynch is going home to visit her father, who is dying. She ends up on this train, the Dreadnought, which makes up most of the journey, and there’s all sorts of wild adventure on board. In Clockwork Century, Cherie Priest imagines a Civil War that hasn’t ended. It’s gone on for decades past when it ended historically. But there’s also a gas which, as you find out in the book before Dreadnought , creates zombies. It’s been refined into a drug, and people are selling it, so they’re basically making zombies at this point. So this is, I guess, the mashup of zombie fiction and steampunk…and it takes place on this confined train. That makes for a great adventure or great horror. Anyone who’s seen Train to Busan knows what happens when you shove zombies on a train: you have nowhere to go. You can’t jump off, it’s going too fast. The first book in the series, Boneshaker , got a lot of press, and won a Nebula Award – and I didn’t find it all that compelling. I thought the opening was really, really good, and then it kind of slowed down. But this one felt like it just kept chugging along – to use the train metaphor. It was the most exciting of Priest’s books. It stands out to me, as well, as an example of steampunk in America, done in an almost Wild West way – there’s a character who’s a Texas Ranger, but there are also opportunities to explore the class differences on board. Mercy Lynch is moving between the third class car, where there are black characters, and the upper class car, because she’s a nurse – she can move between these spaces. It allows Priest to address the history (while completely disregarding other parts of it). It’s a ton of fun. There’s a point at which two steampunk mechs go at it, there’s a battle between them. Mercy is on the sidelines for some of those things, observing – but that’s not to say she never gets in the thick of it. She’s definitely a very tough female character, and an interesting contrast to Carriger’s protagonists, who are always very prim and proper in an almost Jane Austen way. Cherie Priest’s were more rugged frontierswomen. And with both these writers, when their stuff was coming out, they were largely dismissed by the gatekeepers of steampunk at the time – a lot of men wanted their steampunk to be serious, and said it had to have steam or this or that or the other thing. Some of them would allow Cherie Priest into the fold, but they absolutely wouldn’t allow Gail Carriger in. And what’s funny about that is, if you go to Goodreads today and look at the top 10 books that people define as steampunk, good luck finding any of the guys who they thought were all that and a bag of chips. It’s Carriger, Priest, Westerfeld. I think within another five or six years, it’s going to be P. Djèlí Clark and Nisi Shawl . We won’t remember any of the ones that the gatekeepers thought were cool."