Today’s feature is a custom audioslice of Boneshaker from Nebula award finalist Cherie Priest. And it’s not just because I wanted an excuse to contact her for inside scoop on her follow-up, Dreadnought.
*clears throat*
Which I admit I did. And she generously provided the following tease:
“The number one piece of begging-disguised-as-feedback I received after Boneshaker was that people wanted to see more of this world-setting. Seattle as a zombie-plagued wasteland was cool and all, but what about this big fat war going on back east? What about the wild, wild west? So I gave it a lot of thought, and concluded that the best way to share the most real estate would be to have a character travel from east to west—all the way to Seattle. But who would want to visit Seattle? It’s a mess.
The answer came to me in the form of someone’s long lost daughter undertaking a quest to escape the war and join her father. But she’d have to be one hell of a lady to undertake a journey like that, in the 19th century, through war-torn borders states. Young, widowed, determined Red Cross nurse Vinita May Swakhammer Lynch fit the bill damn near perfectly.”
Jealous. I’ve always wanted a nickname like “Swakhammer.”
Well, Dreadnought won’t be out until September, but you can get your steampunk on post-haste via Priest’s June novella, Clementine, from Subterranean Press. (Yes, it’s set in the same world. Bonus!)
Without further ado, here’s narrator Wil Wheaton from a special cut of the digital audio version of Boneshaker:
Liz is…trying to figure out how to get a key for the Cataclysm beta.
