The year in books #18: Boneshaker

The second Hugo nominee I read this year was Cherie Priest's Boneshaker. I was hugely excited to read this book, a steampunk alternate history of mid-19th century Seattle containing zombies and airships - a Hugo-nominated novel built entirely of awesome. How could you go wrong?

As it turns out, Boneshaker manages the remarkable feat of turning a premise that had me gripped by the story before I'd even opened the book into one of the least interesting stories I've read in years. The world itself is wonderfully constructed, with a backstory that riffs delightfully on Seattle's fascinating history and explains in a tolerably plausible way why the city is now a walled-in, zombie-infested hellhole ruled by a mad scientist. Unfortunately, by the time the book actually begins, all of the interesting things seem to have long since taken place.

The tale at the center of Boneshaker is of a mother attempting to rescue her teenage son from the above-mentioned hellhole, assisted by a series of bland characters whose behavior seems driven much more by the needs of the narrative than by their own motivations. The zombies spend the vast majority of the tale lurking threateningly in the background, then prove themselves utterly uninteresting when they do get the chance to chew on the occasional character or provide one of the better-armed side characters with a chance to get splashily violent.

The story itself is also horribly unreasonable. I am willing for the sake of a story to accept any premise, no matter how unrealistic or unreasonable, but the events that flow from that premise must do so naturally. In Boneshaker, the zombies are relatively limited in number (I think the number quoted somewhere was 6,000), can be killed by bullets, and are unable to climb. The humans are armed not only with guns but with an EMP-like device that knocks the zombies senseless for a brief time. And in all the years that Seattle has been infested by these horribly dangerous creatures, no one ever thought to either (a) sit a few guys on the rooftops with rifles to take potshots at them or (b) lure a few hundred zombies at a time into a swarm, stun them, then kill them in great numbers while they lay twitching? Also, as I mentioned above, none of the characters' behavior seems consistent with what we are told about their circumstances. The Seattlites' anger toward the mad scientist who 'rules' is rooted in the fact that... he does things for them so that they are always indebted to him? And they're so horribly angry about this that they're ready to stage an almost instantly successful rebellion, but for some reason restrain themselves until the rebellion becomes useful for the purposes of the novel that they find themselves in. And... and... and...

I was horribly disappointed by Boneshaker and am frankly confused as to how it made it to the Hugo short list. I feel like it was nominated on the strength of its premise rather than on the actual story it contains, which utterly fails to compel.