Customer Reviews

The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

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To be totally honest, I have to say right at the beginning that I am predisposed to love anything Mr. Blaylock writes. So it was with joy that I set in my comfy armchair, cozy under a quilt for the night, and stayed up the entire night reading this wonderful collection. What we have in this book is the Langdon St. Ives stories compiled with the novellas "The Homunculus" and "Lord Kelvin's Machine." What we get is a coherent whole, a novel really, about Professor St. Ives, and his steampunk adventures.

If you love the English language, if you love science fiction/fantasy as it might have been written by P.G. Wodehouse, if you get chills of pleasure when you read well crafted stories, this book is for you.

I cannot say enough good things about this fine author. The only negative I can think of is that he doesn't publish often enough for me!

This volume collects four short stories ("The Ape-Box Affair", "The Hole in Space", "The Idol's Eye", "Two Views of a Cave Painting") and two novels ("Homunculus", "Lord Kelvin's Machine") all featuring the over-the-top adventures of Victorian inventor-hero, Langdon St Ives. If you liked The "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series you'll probably like these; "Agatha Heterodyne, Girl Genius" is silly steampunk in much the same vein (although comic-book format.)

St Ives, his super-valet Hasbro, young Jack Owlesby, and an assortment of other colorful eccentrics try to save the world, or at least themselves, usually from villainous mad scientist Ignacio Narbondo (or at least themselves!) Airships, infernal devices, victoriana, and absurd inventions collide into (usually) absurdly satisfying endings.

I prefer Blaylock's first period ("The Elfin Ship," etc) and third period ("The Last Coin" et al) to these second period stories, but they're still consistently mildly amusing in a Wodehouse kind of way.

These stories are very well written - they exude style, but not in a distracting way, but more subtly. It's just enjoyable to read the words. The settings and stories are interesting as well, although for most of them the characters are not particularly developed. Overall, I'm glad I read this book, even though it was not a page turner.

This book is a fantastic romp through the possibilities of a technologically curious Victorian era. Though the reader never sees directly through the title character's eyes, other characters' descriptions and first-person opinionated accounts form a firm and fond attachment between St. Ives and the reader. Each short story stands well on its own, and also blends perfectly with its neighboring installment to form an enthralling story about one man's intellectual rise into self-destruction, an adventurous support group's sacrifices for friendship, and a society in which superstition is just as real as logic.