Boneshaker

Boneshaker was published by Tor in 2009 and was nominated for the Nebula Award for best novel that year and the Hugo Award in 2010, winning the Locus Award for best science fiction novel in 2010. It is the first of Cherie Priest's Clockwork Century novels, a set of standalone books that share a nineteenth-century America in which the Civil War has stalled and the technology has gone further than it did in ours.

The novel is a steampunk story with zombies in it, which is how the book was described when it came out and how it is still usually shelved. Priest's version of the genre is interested in industrial failure: the machine at the centre of the story was built for a commercial purpose, it was insured, and the people who died in the collapse were an accounting problem afterwards. The gas that makes the rotters is a byproduct, the wall around the city is a municipal solution, and the plot is driven by a boy trying to learn what his father was responsible for and a mother going in after him.

Priest writes the city as a place with a working economy inside the wall: airship crews, bootleggers, the criminal networks that run the tunnels, and the soldiers who keep the perimeter. The sequel novels move to other cities, including Dreadnought and Ganymede, and the series is designed so that a reader can begin anywhere. Boneshaker is the volume most readers start with.