Where Is The Setting Of 'Boneshaker' Located?

Set in an alternate-history version of 1885 Seattle — a disaster-ravaged city crawling under a thick yellow toxic fog after the famous Boneshaker drill went wrong — Boneshaker feels like a complete, richly realized setting, a separate character. It’s a dirty, rusty, very-aware-of-its-own-grime-and-gears world, conveyed most successfully in Priest’s scenes set in the Underground, 1880s Seattle’s network of tunnels, cellars, etc., repurposed as secret hideouts, Mad Science labs, and so on. On the surface of things, the airships are simply there to travel through the air; but they’re also patrolling, like vultures.

The setting of “Boneshaker” not only mirrors the themes of the novel, but also is a wonderful character in itself. The Blight gas, for example, is not just a destructive force, but also an unsubdudable force of nature, showing the dangers of unchecked ambition. The walled city of Seattle, for example, is a symbol of the class divisions of the past, while the airships that roam about are a symbol of hope, and tenuous at that. The name of the novel, “Boneshaker” even refers back to the evil machine that destroyed the city, The Boneshaker, and how it shook the lives of the people living there, as well as their loyalties. This is not just background, this is setting woven into the bricks and the fog of the novel.

Alternate-history Seattle in the 1880s. Seattle is a walled city, hovering on the brink of collapse, filled with noxious toxic gas and the gaping wound left by the cataclysmic event of the Boneshaker. The privileged few live in “clean” districts of the city, while the vast majority of citizens are reduced to scavenging in the horrible Blight for the occasional, fleeting treasure. Others live in the vast, underground maze that exists below the city proper. Airships rule the skies and even seemingly safe cobblestones conceal hidden threats. Priest’s Seattle is a visceral, steampunk world of air, noise, rust and fear.

Priest’s novel of alternate history is a rich and densely detailed portrait of a diseased and dying Seattle. Gaslit streets are hidden beneath a poisonous haze, the wealthy classes fortify themselves against the coming apocalypse in heavily defended compounds, while the poor dig through the dirt like moles. The destroyed wreckage of the great Boneshaker drill sits as a grim monument to human error. Real historical locations such as Pioneer Square are reimagined as centers of violence and strife, while the historic underground tunnels beneath the city are remade as a mad, hidden world of secrets and conflict. The physical setting is not just a backdrop for the action of the novel, it is virtually a character in and of itself, full of hidden danger and possibility in every crumbling alleyway and floating airship.

'Come for the steampunk vision of an alternate Seattle in the 1880s; stay for the cruel, thought-provoking and thoughtfully twisted reconsideration of real events, such as the fact that much of the city is actually constructed underground. The Blight, a cloud of noxious gas that has rendered the surface of the world a deadly wasteland, has driven its human victims underground or behind high stone walls. And in this Blighted world, a vast and treacherous landscape of decaying buildings and hissing pipes and grinding mechanisms waits to be explored.