Lincoln Crisler

I’ll lead this review off with the comment I left on Ms. Priest’s blog post on the TOR website immediately after receiving Boneshaker in the mail:

Got my copy in the mail today!! SQUEEEE! And I’m totally blowing off everything in my TBR pile after finishing the one review I’ve obligated myself to. SQUEEEEE!!

Oh, and before I forget…

SQUEE.  

The easiest way to describe Boneshaker is to say that I read it in less than three days. I usually save my reading for work or the bus ride there and back, but I read this one during my downtime as well. I didn’t remember to download the new episodes of Dexter and Heroes until Wednesday. And the squee never stopped.

Boneshaker is set in an alternate version of Seattle around 1880. The Civil War is still dragging out back East, and the western frontier is more heavily populated than during our history due to the Klondike gold rush happening sooner. A twisted scientist is hired to create a machine to break through the Alaskan ice for gold, and things go awry, devastating Seattle and releasing a poisonous, zombie-creating gas from beneath the Earth’s surface.

Enter Briar Wilkes, the widow of the aforementioned mad doctor, and their teenage son, Ezekiel. Sixteen years after the disaster that ended in two square miles of zombie-infested Seattle being walled off, Zeke figures he can prove his father’s innocence by crawling under the wall and into the city his parents used to call home. Briar chases after, resulting in a nonstop adventure garnished with lavish imagery, clever inventions, steampunk technology, airships, pirates and the living dead.

I fell in absolute LUST with Boneshaker a month before it’s release, at http://theclockworkcentury.com/. You can read a short story set in Priest’s steampunk universe, an excerpt from Boneshaker, and catch news and updates on related projects, to include the upcoming novella, Clementine, and the sequel to Boneshaker, Dreadnought.

5,000,123,890/10. There’s still a couple months to go, but this might be the best book I’ve read in 2009.

Now this is near and dear to my heart, folks. Longbox will be released later this year as a free download. With it, you’ll be able to download digital comics from small presses like IDW (they’ve published stuff like Joe Hill’s Locke & Key and Peter David’s Star Trek: New Frontier comics) for .99 an issue.

Furthermore, you’ll be able to read .cbr and .cbz files with Longbox, as well. For those of you not in the know, those are filetypes commonly used by people who create, download and read scanned/pirated digital comics. I know this is a gray area, but Hell, I have a few gigs of these myself and it makes me happy in my heart place that there’s a chance I won’t have to pirate comics to get certain things that are hard to obtain overseas.

I have, however, retained my ability to detect bullshit a mile away and here’s what I see happening with the Longbox; after all, nothing good can happen without someone wiping their ass on it, right?

– So far, the only players involved are smaller presses. Even if the only small presses involved were IDW and Avatar, I’d be happy, but in order for this to really take off, the major players are going to have to get involved. I won’t wager a guess on whether Image, DC or Marvel will offer content on Longbox, but I’m almost sure that the Big Two won’t sell their comics for .99 a pop. Image might. They’re cool like that.

– Longbox is going to have a proprietary format. If you don’t know what that means, here’s a quick class:

“A proprietary format is a file format which is covered by a patent or copyright which is intended to give the license holder exclusive control of the technology to the (current or future) exclusion of others
(Wikipedia).”

In layman’s terms, they’re saying that the comics you download via Longbox will be in their own special format, created for the Longbox, and that they can do such crazy shit as making the files unreadable on any other program (CDisplay, for instance) or keeping you from transferring the comics to another machine. This is why I stayed away from the Kindle (I like my Sony just fine) and why it took me so long to get an iPod. If this doesn’t change by the time the program is released, it might be enough to make me change my mind, especially if the major publishers aren’t involved.