Ganymede

Author: Cherie Priest
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0230767850
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
Josephine Early, New Orleans brothel owner and Union spy, has a mission. And it might just end the Civil War. She must deliver Ganymede, an astonishing prototype submarine, to the North. But the giant war machine is at the bottom of a lake, no one has safely piloted it and she must sneak its huge bulk past enemy forces. Luckily, she knows the right man for the job. She hasn’t seen former lover and air-pirate Andan Cly for years, but has a sweet job to tempt him back. He agrees to help, but his primary mission is to retrieve supplies for blighted Seattle, where noxious gas has forced residents underground and undead rotters menace the city. Although legit, the Seattle run makes Cly uncomfortable. He no longer flies sap, disapproving of the drug’s ugly side-effects, and the job is funded with sap money. Josephine’s jaunt could be a great distraction. But will they make history, or end up at the bottom of the ocean? 'Priest is at the top of her game ... the best yet’ Publishers Weekly, ‘Ganymede centres on intrigue and espionage’, SFRevu.com, ‘Alternative history storytelling at its finest’ BookSlut.com

Boneshaker

Author: Cherie Priest
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429942495
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska's ice. Thus was Dr. Blue's Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born. But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead. Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue's widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenaged boy to support, but she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history. His quest will take him under the wall and into a city teeming with ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords, and heavily armed refugees. And only Briar can bring him out alive. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Dreadnought

Author: Cherie Priest
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429943645
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
Nurse Mercy Lynch is elbows deep in bloody laundry at a war hospital in Richmond, Virginia, when Clara Barton comes bearing bad news: Mercy's husband has died in a POW camp. On top of that, a telegram from the west coast declares that her estranged father is gravely injured, and he wishes to see her. Mercy sets out toward the Mississippi River. Once there, she'll catch a train over the Rockies and—if the telegram can be believed—be greeted in Washington Territory by the sheriff, who will take her to see her father in Seattle. Reaching the Mississippi is a harrowing adventure by dirigible and rail through war-torn border states. When Mercy finally arrives in St. Louis, the only Tacoma-bound train is pulled by a terrifying Union-operated steam engine called the Dreadnought. Reluctantly, Mercy buys a ticket and climbs aboard. What ought to be a quiet trip turns deadly when the train is beset by bushwhackers, then vigorously attacked by a band of Rebel soldiers. The train is moving away from battle lines into the vast, unincorporated west, so Mercy can't imagine why they're so interested. Perhaps the mysterious cargo secreted in the second and last train cars has something to do with it? Mercy is just a frustrated nurse who wants to see her father before he dies. But she'll have to survive both Union intrigue and Confederate opposition if she wants to make it off the Dreadnought alive. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The Inexplicables

Author: Cherie Priest
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0230767877
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
Adventures await Rector “Wreck ’em” Sherman. About to turn eighteen, he’s facing ejection from the orphanage that passed for home. He should also choose a trade, but work is scarce in steam-powered Seattle. And Rector has more unconventional plans. He’s started dealing in sap, a yellow narcotic produced by rebels and outlaws within the city’s toxic walled enclave. What’s worse, he’s been sampling his wares. Other problems include being haunted by an old friend with a grudge. The pressure builds until he sneaks behind the wall himself, seeking both (un)gainful employment and excitement. As rumoured, he finds a terrifying host of the hungry undead, and then there’s the monster. Rector's certain that his attacker wasn’t human, or undead. But he’s going to need more proof than his own addled word to expose it. His new mission becomes a compulsion when others witness the creature’s destructiveness, and give its kind a name. The Inexplicables. Praise for the series: ‘Everything you’d want ... pure mad adventure’ Cory Doctorow, ‘Adventure of rollicking pace and sweeping proportions' Scott Westerfeld, ‘Cherie Priest is the high priestess of steampunk' The Seattle Times

Clementine

Author: Cherie Priest
Publisher: Novel of the Clockwork Century
ISBN: 9781596064959
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Maria Isabella Boyd's success as a Confederate spy has made her too famous for further espionage work, and now her employment options are slim. Exiled, widowed, and on the brink of poverty - she reluctantly goes to work for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago. Adding insult to injury, her first big assignment is commissioned by the Union Army. A federally sponsored transport dirigible is being violently pursued across the Rockies and Uncle Sam isn't pleased. Intelligence suggests that the unrelenting pursuer is a runaway slave who's been wanted by authorities on both sides of the Mason-Dixon for fifteen years. In that time, Captain Croggon Beauregard Hainey has felonied his way back and forth across the continent, leaving a trail of broken banks, stolen war machines, and illegally distributed weaponry from sea to shining sea. And now it s Maria's job to go get him

Fiddlehead

Author: Cherie Priest
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 146680789X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Book Description
Young ex-slave Gideon Bardsley is a brilliant inventor, but the job is less glamorous than one might think, especially since the assassination attempts started. Worse yet, they're trying to destroy his greatest achievement: a calculating engine called Fiddlehead, which provides undeniable proof of something awful enough to destroy the world. Both man and machine are at risk from forces conspiring to keep the Civil War going and the money flowing. Bardsley has no choice but to ask his patron, former president Abraham Lincoln, for help. Lincoln retired from leading the country after an attempt on his life, but is quite interested in Bardsley's immense data-processing capacities, confident that if people have the facts, they'll see reason and urge the government to end the war. Lincoln must keep Bardsley safe until he can finish his research, so he calls on his old private security staff to protect Gideon and his data. Maria "Belle" Boyd was a retired Confederate spy, until she got a life-changing job offer from the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Pinkerton respects her work, despite reservations about her lingering Southern loyalties. But it's precisely those loyalties that let her go into Confederate territory to figure out who might be targeting Bardsley. Maria is a good detective, but with spies from both camps gunning for her, can even the notorious Belle Boyd hold the greedy warhawks at bay? Another rollicking alternate history from Cherie Priest—Fiddlehead is the fifth book in the Clockwork Century steampunk series that started with Boneshaker. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Boneshaker

Author: Cherie Priest
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781448716159
Category : Horror tales
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Inventor Leviticus Blue creates a machine that accidently decimates Seattle's banking district and uncovers a vein of Blight Gas that turns everyone who breathes it into the living dead. Sixteen years later, Briar, Blue's widow, lives in the poor neighborhood outside the wall that's been built around the uninhabitable city. Life is tough with a ruined reputation, but she and her teenage son Ezekiel are surviving--until Zeke impetuously decides that he must reclaim his father's name from the clutches of history.

Ganymede: The Clockwork Century 3

Author: Cherie Priest
Publisher: Tor UK
ISBN: 1743510152
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
Josephine Early, New Orleans brothel owner and Union spy, has a mission. And it might just end the Civil War. She must deliver Ganymede, an astonishing prototype submarine, to the North. But the giant war machine is at the bottom of a lake, no one has safely piloted it and she must sneak its huge bulk past enemy forces. Luckily, she knows the right man for the job. She hasn't seen former lover and air-pirate Andan Cly for years, but has a sweet job to tempt him back. He agrees to help, but his primary mission is to retrieve supplies for blighted Seattle, where noxious gas has forced residents underground and undead rotters menace the city. Although legit, the Seattle run makes Cly uncomfortable. He no longer flies sap, disapproving of the drug's ugly side-effects, and the job is funded with sap money. Josephine's jaunt could be a great distraction. But will they make history, or end up at the bottom of the ocean?

Too Like the Lightning

Author: Ada Palmer
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 1466858745
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Book Description
From the winner of the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Ada Palmer's 2017 Compton Crook Award-winning political science fiction, Too Like the Lightning, ventures into a human future of extraordinary originality Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer--a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away. The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labelling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competition is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life. And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destablize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life... Terra Ignota 1. Too Like the Lightning 2. Seven Surrenders 3. The Will to Battle At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Renaissance Fun

Author: Philip Steadman
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787359158
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
Renaissance Fun is about the technology of Renaissance entertainments in stage machinery and theatrical special effects; in gardens and fountains; and in the automata and self-playing musical instruments that were installed in garden grottoes. How did the machines behind these shows work? How exactly were chariots filled with singers let down onto the stage? How were flaming dragons made to fly across the sky? How were seas created on stage? How did mechanical birds imitate real birdsong? What was ‘artificial music’, three centuries before Edison and the phonograph? How could pipe organs be driven and made to play themselves by waterpower alone? And who were the architects, engineers, and craftsmen who created these wonders? All these questions are answered. At the end of the book we visit the lost ‘garden of marvels’ at Pratolino with its many grottoes, automata and water jokes; and we attend the performance of Mercury and Mars in Parma in 1628, with its spectacular stage effects and its music by Claudio Monteverdi – one of the places where opera was born. Renaissance Fun is offered as an entertainment in itself. But behind the show is a more serious scholarly argument, centred on the enormous influence of two ancient writers on these subjects, Vitruvius and Hero. Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture were widely studied by Renaissance theatre designers. Hero of Alexandria wrote the Pneumatics, a collection of designs for surprising and entertaining devices that were the models for sixteenth and seventeenth century automata. A second book by Hero On Automata-Making – much less well known, then and now – describes two miniature theatres that presented plays without human intervention. One of these, it is argued, provided the model for the type of proscenium theatre introduced from the mid-sixteenth century, the generic design which is still built today. As the influence of Vitruvius waned, the influence of Hero grew.