Ganymede by Cherie Priest-A Review

So, this is the first review I’m doing for my blog, because I’m trying to take this thing seriously and not do what I usually do, which is start something and then lose interest and wander off to my next shiny, exciting project. In my desperate attempt to exert some personal discipline over myself, I’m writing this now to both remind myself that this blog exists and to generally, I dunno, have an opinion to place upon the Blogosphere.

I got Ganymede about a week ago or so, when I was doing a work placement with the publishing company Legend Press; having fought the urge to go the bookshop just across the road from the offices for an entire fortnight, I finally caved and went in there during a lunch break. Surveying the SF and Fantasy shelves and aware that I was going to have to drag myself back to my desk soon (I had a desk! How fucking cool is that?!), it boiled down to two choices; Ganymede by Cherie Priest, and China Miéville’s Embassytown. I ended up picking up Ganymede as it looked like a fun steampunk adventure and thus the perfect foil for the much heavier and more serious Crime and Punishment which I was then (and still am) working through. My apologies, Mr Miéville; I am aware your work is incredibly deep and intelligent and that you’ve deservingly won about ten jillionty five Hugo awards among other things and will endeavour to pick up your books at a future date. Promise.

So, that left me with Ganymede; I’d never even heard of Cherie Priest before, so had no idea what to expect from her. But I went into Ganymede expecting a fun, Steampunk alternative-history novel, and what I got was a fun, steampunk alternative-history novel. Don’t let that description fool you, though; while it’s certainly a good 0ld-fashioned adventure story on its surface, Ganymede is a book with a surprising amount of depth to it.

The book is the third in Priest’s The Clockwork Century series, set in an alternate history where the American Civil War drags on for much longer than it does in the America we all know today. I’ll admit that all I know about the American Civil War can be written on the back of a business card, but the universe seems both realistic and well largely constructed; I felt some of the worldbuilding was not quite complete and had rather passed me by, but seeing as Ganymede is the third in the series and I’ve read neither Dreadnought nor Boneshaker, and I’m willing to give Priest the benefit of the doubt and assume that much of the foundation-laying was done in those. The book itself is centred around New Orleans, occupied by the Confederacy, and provides an interesting microcosm of one event during the war, and the story itself manages to worldbuild quite effectively even when serving as just a snapshot of the bigger picture. The city itself and the swamps around it are well realised and Priest is able to make the place come alive through a combination of excellent descriptions, evocative imagery and an eye of detail; the result is a world that, evenwith its steampunk trappings and other more fantastical elements, feels as real as our own.

The story follows two main characters; the New Orleans-based brothel madam and Union agent Josephine Early, and Andan Cly, an air pirate who’s attempting to live a new life on the straight and narrow and to settle down as a trader working in Seattle. Josephine contacts him for a job in New Orleans; pilot a prototype submersible, the Ganymede, down the Confederacy occupied Mississippi in order to deliver it to waiting Union forces. Switching between their perspectives on a chapter-by-chapter basis, Priest manages build an engaging pair of lead characters and populates the rest of the book with a well developed and interesting cast; the insatiably curious Houjin, the French-American working girl Ruthie and the mute engineer Fang. As well as this, the temptation to characterise the Confederacy forces (or as they’re referred to in the book for reason I never quite worked out, ‘Texians’) as nothing more than an evil empire is avoided, and while they are undeniably the antagonists of the story there are a couple of sympathetic and engaging characters within their ranks. The novel also deserves credit for managing to weave its main themes of gender and racial politics into its narrative in a manner that fits with the storyline of sneaking a submarine out of enemy-occupied territory quite seamlessly; considering that such things usually have very little to do with submersibles, having them be part of the narrative in a manner that makes them prevalent without directly shoving them in your face is quite a feat indeed.

If there is an issue I found with the story, it’s probably with the pacing; it feels at first that the story is dragging its feet somewhat at the beginning, as if it is reluctant to get going. Once the book does pick up the pace, however, it’s an excellent read; the climax of the novel is an absolutely superb action scene that left my pulse pounding.

In summary, Ganymede is an absolutely superb novel and with it Cheries Priest has earned herself another new fan. Once I’ve finished off Crime and Punishment and gone and read something by China Miéville, I’m definitely picking up some more of her work. But first I need to read something by Mr Miéville, as I don’t want to piss him off. Man be hench.

Getting my shit together

So, yeah, as you saw in the last post, I’ve kind of neglected this whole blog thing. It kind of slipped my mind, and while this was happening my writing has both taken off and crashed down  at the same time. I’ve been ready to write a novel for months now. I’ve been raring to go, champing at the bit; my writing is there, my planning skills are there, and I’ve written two massive, novel-length works on the internet already. I’ve practised, so now it was time to go for the real thing. All I needed, though, was the Idea.

For a while, back in August, I thought I had it. It was going to be a High Fantasy piece, a classic tale of a quest by a band of heroes in an exotic land. I had my unique setting; one based upon ancient Mesopotamia, with a unique system of magic, an interesting pantheon of gods and a truly distinctive, fantastical race to populate the world alongside the regular humans (‘sod elves and dwarves!’ I declared when planning it. ‘Tolkien has already done those! Let’s have something new! Something completely off the wall!’).

The setting was excellent. It was detailed, it had an origin myth, it had politics between states that fought and allied, it had rival factions and religions and scheming noble houses. I was pretty proud of it. Hell, I might even go back to it at one point. There, were, however, two pretty vital storytelling ingredients missing: characters and a storyline.

So I kind of sat on it for a while. I tried to let it brew and ferment. I read history books on Uruk and Babylon and the cities and nations of the Fertile Crescent that it was based upon, hoping for ideas. Nothing came. I was at a low, and aside from a few random shorts and abortive attempts at writing some more longer stuff for the Internet, only one of which is bearing any fruit. So time went by, with the Idea still remaining elusive.

And then two weeks ago, I got myself a work placement at Legend Press Publishers. On Monday, the MD of the place, Tom Chalmers, very generously invited me to a novel-pitching conference they were running, as I said I was interested in writing. I was vaguely aware that I would need something to pitch, but figured ‘yeah, I’ll work it out’. I was mainly there to pick up tips on how to pitch a novel.

Then Friday night came, and I had the terrifying epiphany that I was going to a novel pitching event the next day and did not have a novel to pitch. Like a Soviet conscript scrabbling in the mud and dirt of Stalingrad in hope of picking up a rifle and a few bullets with which to fight the Nazis, the terrifying, looming shadow of the fact that I had to this bearing down upon me like a disapproving Commissar, I looked for an idea I could use.

And inspired mostly by panic and the urgency and exclamation marks I was using in my texts to it, the Idea finally got its act together and arrived. I hammered out the basic outline of a synopsis. I worked out characters. I developed them all today at the pitching conference where I had to pitch that same idea three times to different people, and I am in inestimable debt to the agents, publisher and authors there who inadvertently served as a sounding board to hone those ideas.

So the Idea is finally here. Maybe I’ll expand upon it in future posts if I remember that I have this blog. But in the meantime, I’m going to go and write.

Also, I should probably actually get on with this thing instead of blogging about it. Discipline, dammit…

Sooooooo…

I have a blog.

Yeah. I completely forgot that too. I should probably update this thing more often, shouldn’t I?

Yeah, I’ll get right on that. Gimme some time, I’ve got stuff to do.

Ahem.