Gideon Defoe

A thousand times better than Polidori's "The Vampyr." Though that really isn't saying much if you, like me, have ever had the misfortune to read that story. But certainly the best in the Pirates series to date. I mean what's not to love about the pirates and the Romantics together! It's as if Gideon Defoe (and I still doubt the veracity of that name) wrote this book just for me.

As always, I think I scared people with my laughter during my commute to work. The laughter comes not just from show more the downright silliness of the book (and footnotes) but from the wonderful in jokes for anyone who knows both pirates and Romantics (Castle Ruthven, hah!). And since I've spent much of my life studying both (I'm not PirateJenny for absolutely no reason and Byron just happens to be my favorite poet), I was in heaven. Plus the fact that the only recurring character with a name is Jennifer and she and Byron get rather close, well, that obviously sealed it. show less

You haven't heard of The Pirates! series? splutters incoherently.

These short, sublimely bonkers books which are nothing short of hilarious. They are filled with irreverent looks at history, literature and pop culture and they delight in messing with various tropes, genres and your head. We have had Darwin and Ahab mocked, Victorian society and now the Romantics and um monster movies.

Early next morning the pirate with a scarf found the Pirate Captain pacing back and forth across his cabin, show more like a hairy metronome, or a sad polar bear. So far as anybody could tell, they still weren’t on an adventure, and the Captain was worried that if a grisly murder or a woman with flashing eyes didn’t turn up soon then the Romantics might start to have second thoughts about the entire business.

This time Byron, Percy & Mary Shelly meet up with the Pirates to seek adventure! (Switzerland is boring) They join
up with Charles Babbage to seek Plato's lost work on how to pull girls and end up in trying to track it down in Dracula's lair..

Her eyes lit up like candles - that being the one of the only things that eyes could light up like before Edison

Yes it is silly, it is childish but it’s very very very funny. Defoe knows many facts (and discards most of them), full of
fascinating footnotes, running gags, amusing drawings and a index that bears no relation to the book but tells it's own story. It manages to mock Victoriana, science and romanticism all in one and I devoured it in an afternoon and it managed to cheer me up no end. Humour is so hard to review and this book hard to quote on as the jokes are built so well, so I urge to try a bit here: http://www.gideondefoe.com/page17.htm

Babbage’s three laws of difference engines
First law: A difference engine must have at least six cogs.
Second law: A difference engine must be able to operate a loom.
Third law: A difference engine must be able to kill a man, should the mood take it.

Recommend for anyone in need of cheering up or maybe try the 1st one (although you don’t have to really) [The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists]. Yes it was an Aardman film (very good btw) but the humours is quite different so go check it out.

Anyway last word is Mr Defoe's
Women in diaphanous nighties running down corridors! Brooding men with dark hair! Ghostly banging noises! A bit where the Pirate Captain dresses up as a sexy fireman! The fifth book in the Pirates series contains all of that, and as a special bonus comes with the semblance of an actual plot.

Go read. show less

The Pirates! In an adventure with Scientists is incredibly familiar to me, like a book I've read many times or one that is part of the same reading categories as so many other books I've read so that I must have read it at least once - and yet, when I brought it home from the library with a touch of nostalgia to reread something after 15 years, I discovered that it was completely new to me.

That nostalgia feeling, the familiarity, is an integral part of the book. (Also, I'm pretty sure I show more checked it out from the library at least once and simply never got around to reading it before it had to be returned.) Written in 2004 when Pirates vs Ninjas was just starting to be a pop cultural thing, it takes the ideas of pirates and piratical behaviors/settings and throws historicity and logic out the window. This isn't to say it's completely anachronistic or silly, but actual facts about the 1830s and piracy are sparse on the ground, thanks to the book being a loving homage or parody of serial adventure stories from the early 20th century. "An adventure with Scientists" purports to be a mid-series book, with callbacks to other adventures and character establishing traits from earlier books, and it uses similar dangerous-and-scary-yet-somehow-cozy plot devices and adventurous settings.

There is a level of absurdity in the book that I love. While the HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin appear, they bear very little resemblance to actuality (Darwin's big scientific theory is that dressing a chimpanzee up as a gentleman will indeed make him a gentleman). The pirates are known only by descriptors rather than names, and they're obsessed with ham, in addition to traditional piratical things like shanties, grog, treasure, etc. At one point, the pirates are in two levels of disguise, wearing all three sets of clothing at once: pirate garb, scientists' lab coats, and ladies' clothing. Why? because they're a little bit silly and it makes an amusing picture.

This story is amusing and brief and really I love in equal measures its silliness and its parody of adventure series books. It's definitely 2004-ish feeling, though, with a sort of casual misogyny that I noticed start to fall away in the years following as more people became aware of it, as well as the way pirates were such a big thing back then. I'm really glad I don't encounter the objectification of women in quite the same way or nearly as often in more recent media. show less

If you have seen the Aardman Animations film featuring the Pirate Crew in this story and want to read the book, the book is very, very different. I was not aware of this and I wish I had been. Although I did like the book, I would have liked it a great deal more if I had not been constantly waiting for plot points from the movie to show up.

In the book, we are introduced to the Pirate Captain and his crew, most of whom do not have real names, but are referred to instead by descriptions ("the show more pirate with gout", "the albino pirate", "the pirate with a scarf"). The crew are getting restless after a prolonged vacation in the tropics -- after all, one can laze about on the beach, ogle the pretty locals and drink rum for only so long before it loses its allure. A false hot tip from the Pirate Captain's rival, Black Bellamy, leads the crew to chase after and plunder Charles Darwin's ship, the Beagle, only to become embroiled in scientific theory, a sinister murder plot, a kidnapping and much more.

The front cover of this book describes it as "Blackadder of the High Seas", and that was precisely the comparison I wanted to draw for the second book in this series, which I read first. (Blame the library; that's the order in which they arrived.) It's all very absurd, with plenty of clever jokes that require the reader to make the necessary inferences (e.g. the airship: "I love what you've done with this roaring log fire next to the spare hydrogen cylinders!"). The text is also sprinkled with footnotes that provide some interesting factual tidbits.

The book is also decidedly more in tune with the period (1837) than the movie is, which I would describe as "gleefully anachronistic". The book is also a bit less madcap. So if you want to check out this series and see the movie, read the book first, or at least be prepared for two very different stories that have essentially the same spirit. show less