The Aunt Paradox

When HG Wells seeks the help of gentleman's consulting detective Reginald Worcester and his steam powered assistant, Reeves, they are thrust into the adventure of their lives. Wells' Aunt Charlotte has stolen his time machine and now she is bringing back her different selves from different time periods - twenty-five Aunt Charlottes at last count - and she is changing history. Now it is up to Reeves and Worcester to put things back they way they were except they aren't the only ones wanting the time machine and, if they can't discover who is behind a string of murders, they may find themselves in grave danger, death or, even worse, out of gin.

The Aunt Paradox is a delightfully funny steampunk homage to PG Wodehouse and HG Wells. Reeves, show more as always, is at his robotically brilliant best and Worcester, well, he's never been more determined to solve the case or, at least, enjoy a good martini in different time periods. Like the previous two entries in Dolley's steampunk mysteries, The Aunt Paradox is just a whole lot of fun and a great way to laugh away a boring afternoon. show less

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Title: The Aunt Paradox
Series: Reeves & Worcester Steampunk Mysteries #3
Author: Chris Dolley
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: Steampunk Mystery
Pages: 91
Words: 28K

Synopsis:

From the Publisher

HG Wells has a problem. His Aunt Charlotte has borrowed his time machine and won’t give it back. Now she’s rewriting history!

Reggie Worcester, gentleman’s consulting detective, and his automaton valet, Reeves, are hired to retrieve the time machine and put the show more timeline back together. But things get complicated. Dead bodies start piling up behind Reggie’s sofa, as he finds himself embroiled in an ever-changing murder mystery. A murder mystery where facts can be rewritten, and the dead don’t always stay dead.

My Thoughts:

This was SO MUCH FUN!!!!! Being familiar with HG Wells' story The Time Machine, while not an absolute necessity, definitely makes everything that much funnier. And the author plays around a LOT with Babbage and uses him as the kind of “every genius”, as in Babbage's Cat, ie, is it dead or alive? I'm sure you all know it wasn't Babbage's Cat, but since Babbage is the one who helped the automatons to be created, he gets to be the resident world genius.

Dolley gets right into the horror of Aunts that is prevalent in Wodehouse and really amps things up. Wells' Aunt takes 40+ copies of herself from history for her upcoming birthday and obviously chaos insues. In fact, HG Wells turns into a girl in one of the iterations. It was hilarious.

I also thought Dolley did a good job of wrapping things up so that the timeline established was the only timeline. Nice and neat and orderly. Speaking of neatly, all of this was done in under 100 pages. For feth's sake Sanderson, Gwynne and some of you other frakking authors, take note. A good story can be told without drowning me in your pomposity and super-overabundance of words. Mr Dolley, I salute you for your brevity and wit. More authors should be like you.

★★★★☆ show less

I groaned when I realized this was all about time travel, as I'm not often a fan, but somehow Chris Dolley has done it again with a fun romp. This takes your typical time paradox and redoes it in a hilariously british high society/whodunnit direction that is sure to delight readers. Think if you crossbed The Importance of Being Ernest crossed with The Time Machine, stirred in a cozy mystery, some steampunk, and outputted the whole thing into a PG Wodehouse mould, you'd have a sense of what this story is like. Fun!

What ho!! This quick read was so good I read almost the entire thing aloud to everyone in the room! Witty, charming, urbane and clever, the more-than-slightly clueless Reginald Worcester and his automaton Reeves are the best thing to happen to steam punk. Borrowing heavily and quite well from P.G. Wodehouse, this little gem offers Aunts galore in the first part as a missing time machine mystery is solved. The second half of the book deals with mysterious murders, more time travel, changed timelines and more H.G. Wells as Worcester & Reeves do their thing and solve the whole convoluted mess with panache and quite a bit of gin. An excellent addition to the series. 5 stars. I received a copy of the book-the review is my own.

HG Wells has a problem. His Aunt Charlotte has borrowed his time machine and won’t give it back. Now she’s rewriting history!

Reggie Worcester, gentleman’s consulting detective, and his automaton valet, Reeves, are hired to retrieve the time machine and put the timeline back together. But things get complicated. Dead bodies start piling up behind Reggie’s sofa, as he finds himself embroiled in an ever-changing murder mystery. A murder mystery where facts can be rewritten, and the dead don’t always stay dead.

This 100 page novella is the third instalment in the Reeves and Worcester Steampunk Mysteries.

Received as part of the Librarything May 2014 Early Reviewers batch. Published by BookViewCafe and can be brought from them show more here

Have never read these stories before, but it was soon evident that this is an homage to PG Wodehouse, with a little Sherlock Holmes, Steampunk (in the form of the mechanical Reeves) and Science Fiction (HG Wells as the requisite Bertie) thrown in.

It's fast paced, silly, and you may be able to find some holes in the forever changing timestream if you wanted to try hard enough (but you dont really, because that would spoil all the fun). Discounting the multiple versions of Aunt Charlotte, there is a limited cast, most of whom in the second half are great-great-great relations of other people, most of whom have turned up dead in Worcester's flat at some point - resulting in a rather unflattering book and new nickname. As a Wodehouse style novella, the story is short, and characterisation, especially of the secondary characters is not exactly in depth, but this is not a failing of the book by any means. Worcester's character is easily evidenced by the need of the "emergency gin" bottles hiding around the place and Reeves' continued attempts to recover the situation, much to Reggie's dismay.

So if you are in the mood for a short story designed to give you amusement and even some laughs, this is the book for you! show less

This is a long short story of about seventy pages that is reminiscent of P.G. Woodhouse's writing.
I happen to be a P.G. Woodhouse fan. The first couple of paragraphs of the story had me a bit disoriented, but then I got into familiar waters with the mention of Emmeline Dreadnought as the protagonist's fiancée. She actually has no active role in the story, but is mentioned several times.
The protagonist is Reginald Worcester, a gentleman's consulting detective, who is assisted by his robot Reeves. Reggie functions on gin and Reeves on steam. In this story Reggie's client is Herbert G. Wells, who asks him to retrieve his time machine from his time traveling aunt.
The English pleased me and the story was fun to read. The author did show more successfully incorporate a number of P.G. Woodhouse elements into the story.
I have laughed a lot more when reading a genuine P.G. Woodhouse book, though. I also observe that the story consists mostly of dialogue and having a limited cast of characters and focusing only on Reggie and Reeves, lacks the complexity of a genuine P.G. Woodhouse book.
That said, I would have liked the story to have been two to three times longer. The author can write and the story did entertain me. I do not regret having read it. show less

The Aunt Paradox gives us another delightful romp with Reeves and Worcester. This time the two find themselves entangled in a gnarly bit of time-travel, thanks to H.G. Wells dropping in to hire the robot butler and his dim, endearing master to help him recover his time machine from his aunt who has "borrowed" it. Chaos ensues, the space-time continuum is severely threatened and I found myself engrossed to the end in anticipation of how the dilemmas would be resolved. Great fun.