Steampunk is Still Pretty Cool

Ganymede by Cherie Priest
My rating: 4 of 6 stars






Long, long ago, I picked up a book that scared me. It was called Boneshaker .

This book scared me because it had the potential to be super-awesome. It had:
Zombies
Dirigibles
Steam and punk elements
Violence
Alternate history
Takes place in Seattle, where I was living at the time

I figured it couldn't be good, despite my infatuation with Whitechapel Gods . There was too much riding on it. On the whole, I loved it (even though, for some reason, I forgot to review it). I give it 4/6, due to obvious flaws in the prose and some other issues I'll discuss.

So here we are, with a sequel to a book I enjoyed, and again with guarded enthusiasm. I have to confess that I'm writing this review before writing a review of the other books, mostly by chance. I accidentally skipped Clementine and have yet to finish The Inexplicables, but I have read Boneshaker and Dreadnought. But here we are: Ganymede, which I'd have to say is my 3rd favorite, behind the two books previously mentioned. It is, however, still better than the one I'm currently reading.

The good news is that the world is still intact, and it's still 20 or so years into the American Civil War. Texas is still a Reb-leaning but "neutral" 3rd party, with all its oil reserves creating a Diesel Punk kind of culture and technology. I love this world. It works for me.

So a character from the first book reappears as the hero of this one, working with the other hero, a madam in New Orleans, to get a submarine out of a lake and into the Gulf. I won't spoil the story for you, since it's worth a read. The story is great. I loved it, and it's not the issue.

Here's where we talk about the issues in the book, which are relatively minor, but I'm way too much of a snob to let them pass. There were two main issues: Pacing and style.

In reverse order, I'll start with something that bothers me every time, which is a major part of Priest's style. It is the setting off, as a new paragraph, a single sentence that is supposed to carry more weight or create more drama/tension than just some regular sentence tacked on to a paragraph. The problem is, they don't really do that. It's a gimmick.
And I hate gimmicks.
(See what I did there?) Anyway, this is just lazy and should not be done by anyone. Most of the time, the sentences could have been left out entirely, or at least moved up to the end of the previous paragraph. They are jarring and bump me out of the story, and the damned things are everywhere. Just a small annoyance, but repeated often enough to be worth mentioning.

The pacing of this novel didn't work too well for me (though not enough to kill my enjoyment). I felt like it really got sluggish a time or two in the middle. I know that stories need to slow down and catch their breath before the climax, but here it felt like it almost stopped, then surged forward with a tacked-on ending that held no real suspense for me.

Spoilers here.

So they're in the damned submarine, and they're never caught or seen by the Texans or the Rebs, they have no mechanical issues, and they succeed at everything. Then it's just over. From the ease at which Cly and his crew could handle the sub, I was not left feeling like he was the only man for the job. I just was not given the impression that the average seaman could not have pulled this feat off. I know that the difficulties were referred to in the text, but those references were forced in to heighten the drama artificially. It went from steampunk fantasy to Action Flick right in the last parts. But maybe I'm nitpicking.

Also, since the novel contains characters from other books that I hadn't read or read a long time ago, I kind of felt like I was missing something every time they were mentioned. I would recommend reading them all in a row, so you can stay up-to-date.

All in all, it's a fantastic romp through the war-torn Clockwork Century, and I had a great time burning through it as quickly as my free time would allow.

Read this book if you've read the previous ones. And read the previous ones. Best Steampunk I've ever read.
4 of 6

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