James P. Blaylock

Narbondo / Langdon St. Ives — (1984-2011) Steampunk. Each novel can stand alone.

Homunculus

Does the night seem uncommonly full of dead men and severed heads to you?

Langdon St. Ives is a man of science and a member of the Royal Society. With the help of his dependable and discreet manservant, St. Ives prefers to spend his time secretly building a spaceship in his countryside silo. But currently he’s in London to help his friend Jack Owlesby recover a wooden box containing the huge emerald Jack’s father left him for an inheritance. Things get confusing when it’s discovered that there are several of these boxes that all look the same and all contain something somebody wants. Soon St. Ives, Jack, and a host of other friends and enemies become embroiled in a madcap adventure featuring a toymaker and his lovely daughter, a captain with a smokable peg leg, the scientists of the Royal Society, an evil millionaire, a dirigible steered by a skeleton, a tiny little man in a jar who may be an alien, a cult evangelist who wants to bring his mother back to life, a love-spurned alchemist who keeps trying home remedies to cure his acne, and a lot of carp and zombies.

As you may have guessed, Homunculus is zany and completely over-the-top in the right kind of way. The villains are meant to be caricatures — one of them is hunchbacked and another sneakily lurches around England with his head wrapped in unraveling bandages. They do stupid things such as leaving the curtains open while animating corpses for the evangelist to claim as converts, and tip-toeing up dark staircases carrying bombs with lit fuses. Blaylock’s bizarre but deadpan humor, in the absurdist British style (though Blaylock is American), was my favorite part of the novel. Even though Homunculus is packed with action and very funny when it’s in its farcical mode, the pace sometimes lags and the shallow characters can’t make up for it when that happens. Fortunately, that’s not often. The final scene is a screwball melee as all the heroes and villains, and thousands of London’s citizens, turn out to witness the story’s climax.

I listened to Audible Frontiers’ version of Homunculus which was narrated by Nigel Carrington who was a brilliant choice. There are a lot of similar characters in Homunculus, but Mr. Carrington made them distinguishable. He also hit exactly the right tone with the humor which ranged from deadpan to black comedy to zany farce. In fact, I would specifically recommend the audio version of Homunculus just because Nigel Carrington’s performance was a large factor in my enjoyment of the book.

If you’re in the mood for a surreal British comedy in the vein of Monty Python or Fawlty Towers, James P. Blaylock’s Homunculus will fit the bill nicely. Published in 1986, this is one of the earlier steampunk novels. In fact, Blaylock, along with friends K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers, all of whom studied with Philip K. Dick, are considered fathers of modern steampunk, and it was Jeter who coined the term to describe their work.

Homunculus won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1986. —Kat Hooper

The Ebb Tide

19th-century London. A quiet evening among more or less renowned gentleman, including the gifted scientist-explorer Langdon St. Ives, at their favorite tavern is interrupted by word that a map to a missing mysterious device has been found. In no time, as chronicled by St. Ives's cohort Jack Owlesby, the group sets off to claim the map and device, racing against the shadowy figure of St. Ives's nemesis, Ignacio Narbondo (now known as Dr. Frosticos).

The first new tale of St. Ives in nearly two decades, The Ebb Tide is a brisk steampunk yarn with a dash of Sherlock Holmes. (Steampunk is, of course, a play on cyberpunk; instead of computers, the focus is usually on airships or mechanical men.) The focus in The Ebb Tide is on underwater transports (and a strange underwater environment), which James Blaylock, as usual, describes with clear prose that manages to evoke the derring-do of the age. It's an engaging enough tale, and the illustrations by J.K. Potter are excellent. However, with a modest 110 pages of text (in my advance copy), there's just not much meat to it. There's virtually no character development, and I don't believe Dr. Frosticos even has any dialogue.

Sub Press is offering a deluxe hardcover edition for $35 (or $23 on Amazon as of October 2, 2009); however, many fans of steampunk would be better served by purchasing the Steampunk anthology (edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer) for about $10, as the latter includes the more satisfying St. Ives tale "Lord Kelvin's Machine" (one of the best tales in the anthology), as well as many other good stories. Thus, The Ebb Tide is recommended as a purchase for die-hard steampunk aficionados, or as a library loan for casual steampunk fans. 3 small brass portholes. —Rob Rhodes

The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs

Langdon St. Ives returns in The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs, James P. Blaylock’s latest Langdon St. Ives Adventure.

St. Ives is described as “the greatest, if largely unheralded, explorer and scientist in the Western World … piecing together a magnetic engine for a voyage to the moon.” Unfortunately, the premise of The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs is less ambitious than its protagonist. Although our heroes are explorers and scientists, they do little exploring here. In fact, they don’t even leave England. Worse, there is little mention of magnetic engines or steam engines, though an emerald’s power has a slight impact on the plot.

The adventure begins with an outbreak of madness at the Explorer’s Club, but don’t expect to see mad explorers. Instead, Tubby Frobisher, one of St. Ives’ colleagues, confesses that he sang “The Sorrows of Old Bailey,” which we should assume sounded dreadful but feels like a tease rather than an actual joke. Surely Blaylock could have done more with a collection of mad explorers in a steampunk universe. Ultimately, it’s enough to get St. Ives and his chronicler Jack Owlesby to put aside their kidney pie so that they can track down their dreaded nemesis, Dr. Ignacio Narbondo.

Hopefully this all sounds familiar because Blaylock relies on our awareness of archetypal characters to propel his plot. There is little time spent outlining why St. Ives and his assistant should leave their jam roly-poly, perhaps because the reader is expected to understand that this is simply what characters based on Sherlock Holmes should do. If St. Ives is a nod to Sherlock Holmes and Owlesby a nod to Watson, Dr. Ignacio Narbondo is our Moriarty. Owlesby describes him as “the sort of evil genius whose machinations are carried out by men easily manipulated by greed or fear. He was gnome-like in feature.” We can likewise take his motivations, his defeat and his eventual escape for granted.

Instead of plotting, characterization or setting, Blaylock has focused on tone and voice, giving The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs the feel of a pastiche. J. K. Potter’s illustrations do a good job of introducing a wry tone early, and his representations of Dr. Narbondo are actually quite funny. However, although a pastiche will imitate other works, it still needs to do something with its allusions and our expectations. Sadly, The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs rarely manages more than a few good jokes. —Ryan Skardal