The Digging Leviathan

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 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, show more heartwarming, occasionally terrifying tale of the adventure that happens before the other adventure begins. show less

Featuring a scattered narrative with a bumbling cast of characters muddling through various situations, this book is not half as clever as Blaylock probably intended. It is also not steampunk; more magical realism or science-fantasy with nearly incomprehensible 'science', (the machine works because Giles thinks it will. Otherwise, it is powered by nothing more than a picture of a printed circuit. Ummm... wut?!?). Nevertheless, the book does feature many passages of wonderfully descriptive writing. I also enjoyed the subtle references to The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. I had heard they both independently wrote William Ashbless into their narratives so I knew to expect him as a character here - but the sly mention of Brendan Doyle made me show more smile, as did the even more subtle mention of a man with the face of a hairy ape. I plan to follow-up read [Zeuglodon] soon. show less

Like everything by Blaylock, unlike anything I've ever read. This one teases to the very end.,but the journey is fun

So this started off slow but then got better and better as I got to know the characters and understand what was happening. When I read the back blurb I really thought that the characters were going to be immersed in a world like Pellucidar but instead it ended up being a bunch of crazy old men running around trying to solve mysteries and save the world.

It's reminiscent of "Cloud Atlas" though I've only seen the movie so I'm not sure how the book handled the "senior citizen revolt" and obviously this came out way before Cloud Atlas.

I REALLY loved the cover art on my paperback and now I'm disappointed to find that the hardcovers have other (lesser) art. It just has that kind of Norman Rockwell on acid vibe that EXACTLY fits the tone of show more the book. show less

Another amazing book by Blaylock. I was into Powers before Blaylock, and missed out on some of Blaylock’s earlier books, including The Digging Leviathan. Luckily, Babbage Press has been reprinting some of Blaylock’s older books in reasonably nice trade paperback editions (and they’re planning to do some of Powers’s works, too).

Anyway, the book: Most of this book takes place in modern day Los Angeles. It deals with the attempts of a typically odd group of amateur scientists to find a way into the interior of the earth by exploring deep tide pools. They are opposed by an assortment of scientists, psychiatrists, and even, at times, by the poet William Ashbless.

This book is clearly and strongly tied to Homunculus, with descendants show more of some of those characters appearing in Leviathan. It’s also tied to Powers’s The Anubis Gates through Ashbless, who appears to have survived until the events of the story. (There’s also a brief reference to Brendan Doyle and Steerforth Benner, characters from The Anubis Gates.)

I’ve yet to read a Blaylock or Powers book or story that I haven’t liked, and Leviathan is no exception. I can often strongly identify with Blaylock’s characters, if not their situations, and the quirks of these characters are in line with those in other Blaylock books. show less

Set in a 1950s/60s Southern California filled with eccentric characters and strange happenings, teenager Giles Peach, born with gills and webbed fingers, and his friend Jim Hastings construct a digging machine to burrow to the center of the earth.

Fabulous ideas, beautiful writing, bloodless characters. Except for the paranoid man none of them seemed to have strong emotions, didn't react to the strange events around them. And even in the context of the story the stuff was still strange. Nobody to care about, didn't finish.