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Dreadnought Reviewed By Lavanya Karthik of Bookpleasures.com
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Lavanya Karthik

Reviewer Lavanya Karthik: Lavanya is from Mumbai, India and is a licensed architect and consultant in environmental management. She lives in Mumbai with her husband and six-year old daughter. She loves reading and enjoys a diverse range of authors across genres.



 
By Lavanya Karthik
Published on December 18, 2010
 

Author: Cherie Priest

Publisher: Tor Books

ISBN:  978-0-7653-2578-5

It is perhaps the sheer power of the machinery in this book that makes the climax a little disappointing for me – I thought the magnificent Dreadnought demanded a foe as formidable and inventive as itself, rather than the George Romero-inspired chomp fest Priest offers it instead.




Author: Cherie Priest

Publisher: Tor Books

ISBN:  978-0-7653-2578-5

Click Here To Purchase Dreadnought


With eight other books to her credit, Cherie Priest has been hailed ‘high priestess of steampunk fiction’, and ‘Dreadnought’, second in her Clockwork Century series,  reminds us why, with  its masterful reinvention of some beloved steampunk tropes, and its gutsy, tough-as-nails heroine, Mercy Lynch.

Nursing at a war hospital in Virginia during the American Civil War, Mercy has barely had time to process the news of her husband’s death when she is summoned to Seattle by her dying father, a man she barely knows since his abandonment of her as a child. Why bother, you would ask, given the dangerous journey she would need to make across enemy lines, for a reunion with a man who is essentially a stranger. Yet set out she does, as much out of curiosity as the sheer need to get away from the hospital, on an epic voyage involving dirigibles (that familiar staple of all things steampunk), steamboats, and finally – bringing to mind nothing so much as ‘Planes ,Trains and Automobiles’, that other eventful cross country chronicle of one man’s journey home - the ‘Dreadnought’, an armoured Union train that she hesitantly boards as a Confederate sympathizer.

What should have been an uneventful, if strained , journey among strangers soon develops into a desperate battle for survival as bushwhackers, Rebel soldiers, Confederate war machines  and internal intrigue threaten the Dreadnought . But worse is to come for, rather like the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic, the Dreadnought finds itself ambushed by a foe unlike anything it has been equipped to deal with, and it will take the combined efforts of Mercy and the squabbling remnants of the Dreadnought’s passenger list to fight off this threat and stay alive. 

‘Dreadnought’ has it all – terrific weaponry, warring factions, zombies, insane scientists obsessed with biological warfare, and a swashbuckling heroine as resilient and formidable as the eponymous engine itself.  A tad slow in the first half, despite a smattering of combat sequences, the plot picks up pace considerably with the advent of the uber-train. This is a well written book brimming with great characters – almost all the toughest ones being female – but the ones I most enjoyed were the machines, each so unique and lovingly detailed by Priest as to seem human in their own right. Her descriptions of the Dreadnought  and her nemesis, the Shenandoah ,  as they race and battle each other are some of the best in the book;  read  her scenes involving  the terrifying walkers and the near comical (if deadly)  three wheeled ‘meat baskets’ and you get the feeling she would almost like them to succeed.

I loved the ease with which Mercy negotiates the treacherous terrain that is the Dreadnought, despite her skirts and corset - scaling compartments, leaping between carriages while hurtling along at break neck speed , even defying death as she leans out to save a man running alongside the speeding train.  It almost feels like a partnership of sorts between woman and engine , these two fierce warriors so like each other, and I confess  to feeling a twinge of sadness when she finally disembarks and walks away from that mighty iron beast without so much as a second glance.

I was also quite taken  with Priest’s envisioning of her machines as hybrids -twinning diesel engines with steam-run ones - rather than resorting to the mysterious , often unexplained  fuels  that steampunk writers so conveniently power their fictional machines with.  Steampunk is dying, Priest seems to suggest. Make way for diesel punk.

It is perhaps the sheer power of the machinery in this book that makes the climax a little disappointing for me – I thought the magnificent Dreadnought demanded a foe as formidable and inventive as itself, rather than the George Romero-inspired chomp fest Priest offers it instead. But then, at its heart, this book is less about the Dreadnought than it is about Mercy’s journey and, when it finally ends - in a neat arc that connects up with the book’s prequel, ‘Boneshaker’ (in turn explaining the origins of the ravenous undead hordes) – you know that greater adventures await her. And us - the legion of readers inexorably drawn to the high octane ride that Priest’s  Clockwork Century promises to be.

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