3.5 starsORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature."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.
Homunculus by James P. Blaylock is a part of the “A Tale of Langdon St. Ives” series. Now, for some people who aren’t familiar with James P. Blaylock, let’s just say that he is often called a founding father of the steampunk genre. In other words, if you’re into steampunk, you need to at least get some Blaylock into your reading list. But I digress. The point is that Homunculus is a well written book that will give your imagination a great workout. Set in Victorian London, an alternative – steam powered – tale sets the scene. Our hero, Professor Langdon St. Ives, has a mission. Recover a wooden box containing a huge emerald that Jack Owlesby’s father left for him. However it’s easier said than done. Throw in a few mad-scientists, villains, a dirigible steered by a skeleton, a tiny little man in a jar who may be an alien, and reanimated corpses into the mix and you have a novel filled with sci-fi/steampunk that will have you laughing at inappropriate times, biting your nails as the story progress and turning the pages constantly.Steampunk isn’t really my genre of choice, but I do enjoy dabbling in things that I don’t know and I was surprisingly pleased after I finished this book (lucky for me I had two other Langdon St. Ives books to read, so that rocked too). You see, what I prefer in books is originality to some degree, imaginative settings that’s creative and beautiful, and good writing. Throw those elements together and you have Homunculus, which will make you love the genre and the author (not to mention the characters). What’s more is that this particular book won the Philip K. Dick award back in the day (1986), which already tells you that it’s a really good novel and definitely worth a read.I won’t say that steampunk is now my preferred genre, but I will keep on reading James P. Blaylock and try to keep my mind open when it comes to other steampunk authors.(Originally reviewed on www.killeraphrodite.com )
What do You think about Homunculus (2000)?
This book had everything that intrigued me: multiple parties trying to find a mysterious airship, puzzle boxes containing weird artifacts and even the living dead. Unfortunately this book delivered on none of the promise. The characters heroes were hard to differentiate from one another, the villains were too numerous with shallow motives, and the central airship and it's mysterious passenger touchdown at the very end of the story barely long enough for a cup if tea. While the concept was good, the execution was not.
—Eric
The first book I read by Blaylock was All The Bells on Earth . All The Bells On EarthThat book immediately won me over. It was an exquisite example of what Dark Fiction (or Urban Fantasy, or the new Weird, or whatever you call the genre) can do. Unfortunately, since that book I just haven't found another Blaylock book as good.This book wasn't bad, and I guess I judged it two ways.If I judged it on its own, I probably would have given it a 2. It starts slow, I didn't really find myself enjoying it until about halfway into the book. The characters are easy to confuse. There's a good sized cast, and they all seem to fall within two groups. The good and the bad. Within those groups the characters are all but interchangeable. The plot was tangled, but still felt arbitrary. In the end I don't feel like the characters really moved the book, rather they were caught up in it.Where this book scores points is when judged within the steampunk genre. This was one of the early cornerstones of that form. And in that respect it was a fun read. It did pick up in the second half. And if you like the general setting and style of steampunk stories you'll enjoy this one.
—Christopher
I so wanted to like this book -- it's one of the first steampunk novels, and it features neat stuff like the Trismegistus Club and a sort of Flying Dutchman dirigible and the reanimated head of late 18th century mystic Joanna Southcote.But like the skeletal remains of Southcote, it's just somehow not fleshed out. The characterization is all on the surface, and the writing just seems to skitter around from subplot to subplot, without sufficiently developing anything. It also harps, with mean-spirited glee, on the skin problems of one of the villains; that actually put me out of sympathy with the narrative as a whole.
—Catherine Siemann
