James P. Blaylock

A love letter to a beloved time and place and milieu - a bunch of eccentrics tooling around Northern California in the 1960s dreaming of travelling to the centre of the Earth. Two rival projects - a bathysphere and a digging machine, but it soon becomes apparent that neither is going anywhere without young Gil Peach with his gills and his webbed fingers and his extraordinary gift for creating impossible inventions out of junk - anti-matter, anti-gravity, perpetual motion. Seduced away by the show more vainglorious scientist and the sinister psychologist, can his friends and family find him and win him back and win the race? There's a distinct possibility the world will explode if they don't.

This is a lot of fun. It's a smart, inventive, heartwarming, occasionally terrifying tale of the adventure that happens before the other adventure begins. show less

Oh wow I do love that cover.
Chaotic but carefully orchestrated characters clash and chase and sneak and yell their way round London after a multiplying number of beautifully made boxes with different contents which are are stolen, retrieved, lost, pursued and fought over by scientists, vivsectionists and millenial cultists, all in the shadow of the impossible blimp piloted for ten years across the skies by a dead man, and due to make its final landfall, carrying as it does yet another of the show more boxes, which may or may not contain the amazing Homonculus itself.
A gleeful frolic through the wonders and horrors of mad science. show less

La trama se desarrolla de manera frenética, siempre están pasando cosas, lo que hace que quieras volver a la lectura una y otra vez. Esto es lo primero que atrae de ‘Homúnculo’, una novela precursora del steampunk, aunque en aquella época no se hablaba de este subgénero, era simplemente literatura fantástica. Me ha hecho gracia la mención de William Ashbless, un poeta inventado por Tim Powers y el propio Blaylock, que hay que decir que son amiguetes. Al tal Ashbless ya lo conocí show more en esa obra maestra que es ‘Las puertas de Anubis’, que recomiendo encarecidamente. Y ‘Homúnculo’ tiene algo de aquélla, esa velocidad en la trama y ese enlazar situaciones, aunque Las puertas me dejó mucha más huella, por lo loco de la trama.

¿Y de qué va ‘Homúnculo’? Londres, finales del siglo XIX. Un extraño dirigible, pilotado por un esqueleto, sobrevuela la ciudad. Tenemos a Langdon St. Ives, inventor y más cosas, que va tras este dirigible, y su contenido, tal vez un alienígena y una posible nave extraterrestre. Se habla de una rara caja con un hombrecito en su interior con poderes. ¿Quizá un alienígena? Pero hay más cajas de estas, lo que llevará a más de un equívoco. También anda por ahí un tal doctor Narbondo, capaz de resucitar a los muertos con una glándula de las carpas. Hay más personajes excéntricos, a cuál más atractivo. Como se puede apreciar, la historia es un puro y maravilloso locurón. show less

A cheese-maker sails down the river to trade his wares and inadvertently finds himself in the middle of an adventure involving a sinister dwarf and a magic watch.

The Elfin Ship deals with three men on a boat (to say nothing of the dog) going on a reluctant quest in which good food and creature comforts are elaborately described, all written in the folksy style of the 19th-century American West. Which is to say that the book reads like a mélange of Jerome K. Jerome, J. R. R. Tolkien (circa show more The Hobbit), and Mark Twain (with perhaps a dash of Jules Verne's steampunkisms thrown into the mix). The book begins with an epigram from The Wind in the Willows, but I would argue that Kenneth Grahame's influence is largely absent from this novel. While both books share a focus on homey comforts, boating trips, and unheroic decency, Grahame's book has a degree of pathos and human frailty that is absent from The Elfin Ship, which is merely sweet and comforting and forgettable. show less