Clockwork Century Books In Order

Publication Order of Clockwork Century Books

Chronological Order of Clockwork Century Books

The “Clockwork Century” is a series of steampunk novels by popular American novelist Cherie Priest. Cherie Priest is a blogger and novelist from Chattanooga, Tennessee that was born in Tampa Florida. Priest is a graduate of Forest Lake Academy, a boarding school run by the Seventh Day Adventists in Apopka, Florida. As a child she lived all over the country following her Army father all across Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, and Florida. She got her masters from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where she studied Professional/Rhetoric writing. Before her master studies, she had got her bachelors from the Southern Adventist University of Collegedale. Cherie was resident in Chattanooga for more than a decade, a city that would later become the setting for the “Eden Moore” series. She also wrote her debut work “Four and Twenty Blackbirds” while she was living in the city. After several years living in Seattle, Washington with Aric Annear her husband, she is back in Tennessee from where she still writes her award-winning steampunk. While she was raised as an Adventist and even went to their schools and colleges, she cut off her affiliation with the church and is now non religious.

Cherie Priest first got into Steampunk when she read some comments on a message board that said Americans could not write steampunk as the genre had to be set in Victorian England. Worked up by the comments, she decided to take up the challenge and in 2009 published “Boneshaker” the first novel of the “Clockwork Century” series. She never knew that the attempt to prove people wrong would become a very popular ongoing series that would go on to win Best Science Fiction Novel by Locus Magazine and PNBA, the Nebula and Hugo Awards. In fact the “Boneshaker” novel is deemed at the watershed moment when the steampunk novel was recognized as a rising force in the science fiction and fantasy genre. Publishing through Tor, Cherie published the Eden Moore, among several freestanding novels. Cherie’s nonfiction articles and short stories have been featured in numerous anthologies and fine publications including “Publishers Weekly” and “Weird Tales”. She has also been a reviewer for “Chiaroscuro” the Bram Stoker Award-winning website. She regularly attends genre conventions and is a panelist at Dragoncon, Steamcon, and Penguincon. Priest also writes articles and gives talks about urban exploration. She lives with her husband, a fat black cat, and a big shaggy dog in Chattanooga Tennessee.

The “Clockwork Century” series is a series of novels set in the latter part of the 19th century where the Civil War is still ongoing. It is an alternate world history setting that shows unimaginable horrors coupled with the technological progress brought about by the never ending war. The year is 1880 and the war has been raging for close to two decades ravaging the country side and cities, and forcing people out of their states as they head west to look for a more peaceful life. An even more sinister happenstance is that the war has driven technology into terrible and strange directions. Some have found peace in the West while others just run into something dark and sinister. Armored personnel carriers crawl on the surface while combat dirigibles in their hulking frames streak across the sky. Military scientists have been twisting the laws of nature and man and have sold their souls to obtain steam, fire, and light to win the war. But for the lower echelons of the soldiery and the ordinary citizens’ life goes on. The country is full of mysterious and man made devastation, is dotted with abandoned towns and cities and barren farmland. The frontiers of the western territories are stripped for their resources while the cities are walled away to rot and swallowed by gas. On the Southern and Northern borders spies scheme and scour the land while smugglers have become even more efficient than the governments hunting them down. The “Clockwork Century” is a different dark world dull of zeppelin pilots, giant machines, weird drugs, and zombies.

“Boneshaker” the first novels of the “Clockwork Century” series of novel;s is set in the advent of the Civil War when newcomers were flooding the Pacific Northwest following rumors of gold in the Klondike. Anxious to exploit the gold, the Russians have engaged Leviticus Blue, an eminent inventor to make a machine that could dig into the Alaskan ice that results in the aptly named Dr Blue’s Incredible Bone Shaking Engine. But the drilling goes terribly wrong on the first test run as it is so powerful that it leads to the collapse of several buildings in downtown Seattle, and unearths a dark vein of subterranean gas that immediately turns everyone in the vicinity into zombies. Sixteen years later, the army moved in and walled in the devastated city full of the poison gas. Briar Wilkes who is the widow to the inventor of the drill lives just beyond the wall and endures a hard life with a teenage boy to support and a ruined family name. Life is hard but the son is determined to do everything he can to reverse history and have a shot at a better life. His quest will take him right into the city full of heavily armed refugees, criminal overlords, air pirates, and the ravenous dead that could kill him at any time.

“Dreadnought” the second novel of the series has Mercy Lynch working in Richmond when the message filters through saying that her father had been seriously injured while her husband just died in a prisoner of war camp. Mercy sets out for Washington to go see her father leaving her job at the military hospital behind. She endures a harrowing adventure crossing the ravaged and war torn country on rail, dirigible, and the Mississippi. Once she gets to St Louis she finds the only means of transport is the Dreadnought, a union operated steam engine that is as fast as it is terrifying. She is out of money and options and gets onto the Dreadnought. What should have been a fast and tranquil trip soon becomes a nightmare when the train is set upon by bushwackers and then waylaid by a troop of rebels. With the train moving away from the thick of the battle worn states into the more peaceful west Mercy is bewildered as to why there is so much resistance to it. A frustrated nurse that just wants to get to see her father on his deathbed she has to survive the onslaught of Confederate opposition and Union intrigues to get to Seattle. What she does not know is that there is mysterious cargo in the last car of the train.