In 1870s London, a city of contradictions and improbabilities, a dead man pilots an airship and living men are willing to risk all to steal a carp. Here, a night of bangers and ale at the local pub can result in an eternity at the Blood Pudding with the rest of the reanimated dead.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
Few writers dare attempt a historical fantasy in an effort to best Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and Robert Louis Stevenson at their own game, but back in 1986 - long before the current alternate history craze - James Blaylock not only tried, but succeeded brilliantly. Homunculus was awarded the Philip K. Dick Award.
About the Author
Winner of the World Fantasy Award and the Philip K. Dick Award, James P. Blaylock is the author of Winter Tides, All the Bells on Earth, Night Relics, The Paper Grail, The Last Coin, Land of Dreams, Homunculus, and The Digging Leviathan. He lives in Orange, California, where he is a creative writing instructor at Chapman University.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful
By M. Schmidt
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Homunculus is a roller coaster of excitement. I think Blaylock may have lived in 18th century London, and might actually know the secret of the carp bladder himself.
I have a theory, in fact that James P. Blaylock is none other than his own character Ignacio Narbondo, and these books are simply his own autobiography. Of course he threw us off his trail when he killed himself in the "Digging Leviathan".
This book, and series is excellent (I'm half way through Lord Kelvin's Machine). However, it's not as good as "The Elfin Ship", "Disappearing Dwarf" and "The Stone Giant". I don't know if these are available any longer, I may have the last copies on earth, but if you can find them, do read them...
I have a theory, in fact that James P. Blaylock is none other than his own character Ignacio Narbondo, and these books are simply his own autobiography. Of course he threw us off his trail when he killed himself in the "Digging Leviathan".
This book, and series is excellent (I'm half way through Lord Kelvin's Machine). However, it's not as good as "The Elfin Ship", "Disappearing Dwarf" and "The Stone Giant". I don't know if these are available any longer, I may have the last copies on earth, but if you can find them, do read them...
15 of 18 people found the following review helpful
By R. Benardes
Format:Paperback
Ok.It's not an easy read.
Ok.It's digressive.
Ok.The plot is convoluted and complex as hell.
Ok.The characters don't feel "realistic"or "believable"
Ok.He is not Tim Powers
So What !!!???
HOMUNCULUS is undiluted quintessencial Steampunk.Blaylock's prose is stylish, intricate and labyrinthine.Sometimes witty, sometimes dark and blackly humorous, and like Joe Lansdale
and Norman Partridge, he has a fine eye for vivid comic book imagery and absurd situations that sometimes verges on the surreal.
To give you a taste of Blaylock magic, here is some samples picked at random:
There was no room in the world of science for mediocrity, for half measures, for wet cigars.
And another:
I'm posessed by the most evil aching of the head - such that my eyes seem to press down to the size of screwholes, so that I see as if through a telescope turned wrong end to. Laudanum alone relieves it, but fills me with dreams even more evil than the pain in my forebrain. I'm certain that the pain is my due - that it is a taste of hell, and nothing less. And I can feel myself decay, feel my tissues drying and rotting like a beetle-eaten fungus on a stump, and my blood pounds across the top of my skull. I can see my own eyes, wide as half crowns and black with death and decay, and Narbondo ahead with that ghastly shears. I pushed him along! That is the truth of it. I railed at him. I hissed. I'd have that gland, is what I'd have, and before the night was gone. I'd hold in my hand my salvation ...
HOMUNCULUS is a celebration of the absurd and a triumph of the imagination, a little masterpiece of humour and atmosphere.
Here is a short list of authors, books, movies, Tv Shows and comic books that I think share the same Blaylockean (non) sense of invention and absurdity:
Authors and Books:
R. A. Lafferty (Nine Hundreds Grandmothers; Lafferty in Orbit).
Robert Sheckley (The Mask of Manana or another collection, Journey Beyond Tomorrow; Immotarlity Inc etc.).
Steven Millhauser (Some novellas and short stories in The Barnum Museum and The Knife Thrower)
Norman Partridge (The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists; Bad Intentions; Mr Fox and Other Feral Tales)
Graphic Novels/Comic Books:
Ruse (Mark Waid)
Starman (James Robinson)
Sebastian O; Doom Patrol (Grant Morrison)
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Alan Moore)
Top Ten (Alan Moore)
The Airtight Garage (Moebius)
Movies:
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Time After Time
That Magnificent Man and Their Flying Machines
Young Sherlock Holmes
Fearless Vampire Killers
Robur the Conqueror
Young Einstein
TV Shows:
Wild, Wild West
Bisko County Jr
The Avengers
The New Avengers
Ok.It's digressive.
Ok.The plot is convoluted and complex as hell.
Ok.The characters don't feel "realistic"or "believable"
Ok.He is not Tim Powers
So What !!!???
HOMUNCULUS is undiluted quintessencial Steampunk.Blaylock's prose is stylish, intricate and labyrinthine.Sometimes witty, sometimes dark and blackly humorous, and like Joe Lansdale
and Norman Partridge, he has a fine eye for vivid comic book imagery and absurd situations that sometimes verges on the surreal.
To give you a taste of Blaylock magic, here is some samples picked at random:
There was no room in the world of science for mediocrity, for half measures, for wet cigars.
And another:
I'm posessed by the most evil aching of the head - such that my eyes seem to press down to the size of screwholes, so that I see as if through a telescope turned wrong end to. Laudanum alone relieves it, but fills me with dreams even more evil than the pain in my forebrain. I'm certain that the pain is my due - that it is a taste of hell, and nothing less. And I can feel myself decay, feel my tissues drying and rotting like a beetle-eaten fungus on a stump, and my blood pounds across the top of my skull. I can see my own eyes, wide as half crowns and black with death and decay, and Narbondo ahead with that ghastly shears. I pushed him along! That is the truth of it. I railed at him. I hissed. I'd have that gland, is what I'd have, and before the night was gone. I'd hold in my hand my salvation ...
HOMUNCULUS is a celebration of the absurd and a triumph of the imagination, a little masterpiece of humour and atmosphere.
Here is a short list of authors, books, movies, Tv Shows and comic books that I think share the same Blaylockean (non) sense of invention and absurdity:
Authors and Books:
R. A. Lafferty (Nine Hundreds Grandmothers; Lafferty in Orbit).
Robert Sheckley (The Mask of Manana or another collection, Journey Beyond Tomorrow; Immotarlity Inc etc.).
Steven Millhauser (Some novellas and short stories in The Barnum Museum and The Knife Thrower)
Norman Partridge (The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists; Bad Intentions; Mr Fox and Other Feral Tales)
Graphic Novels/Comic Books:
Ruse (Mark Waid)
Starman (James Robinson)
Sebastian O; Doom Patrol (Grant Morrison)
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Alan Moore)
Top Ten (Alan Moore)
The Airtight Garage (Moebius)
Movies:
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Time After Time
That Magnificent Man and Their Flying Machines
Young Sherlock Holmes
Fearless Vampire Killers
Robur the Conqueror
Young Einstein
TV Shows:
Wild, Wild West
Bisko County Jr
The Avengers
The New Avengers
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"Does the night seem uncommonly full of dead men and severed heads to you?"
Langdon St. Ives is a man of science and a member of the Royal Society. With the help of his dependable and discreet manservant, St. Ives prefers to spend his time secretly building a spaceship in his countryside silo. But currently he's in London to help his friend Jack Owlesby recover a wooden box containing the huge emerald Jack's father left him for an inheritance. Things get confusing when it's discovered that there are several of these boxes that all look the same and all contain something somebody wants. Soon St. Ives, Jack, and a host of other friends and enemies become embroiled in a madcap adventure featuring a toymaker and his lovely daughter, a captain with a smokable peg leg, the scientists of the Royal Society, an evil millionaire, a dirigible steered by a skeleton, a tiny little man in a jar who may be an alien, a cult evangelist who wants to bring his mother back to life, a love-spurned alchemist who keeps trying home remedies to cure his acne, and a lot of carp and zombies.
As you may have guessed, Homunculus is zany and completely over-the-top in the right kind of way. The villains are meant to be caricatures -- one of them is hunchbacked and another sneakily lurches around England with his head wrapped in unraveling bandages. They do stupid things such as leaving the curtains open while animating corpses for the evangelist to claim as converts, and tip-toeing up dark staircases carrying bombs with lit fuses. Blaylock's bizarre but deadpan humor, in the absurdist British style (though Blaylock is American), was my favorite part of the novel. Even though Homunculus is packed with action and very funny when it's in its farcical mode, the pace sometimes lags and the shallow characters can't make up for it when that happens. Fortunately, that's not often. The final scene is a screwball melee as all the heroes and villains, and thousands of London's citizens, turn out to witness the story's climax.
I listened to Audible Frontiers' version of Homunculus which was narrated by Nigel Carrington who was a brilliant choice. There are a lot of similar characters in Homunculus, but Mr. Carrington made them distinguishable. He also hit exactly the right tone with the humor which ranged from deadpan to black comedy to zany farce. In fact, I would specifically recommend the audio version of Homunculus just because Nigel Carrington's performance was a large factor in my enjoyment of the book.
If you're in the mood for a surreal British comedy in the vein of Monty Python or Fawlty Towers, James P. Blaylock's Homunculus will fit the bill nicely. Published in 1986, this is one of the earlier steampunk novels. In fact, Blaylock, along with friends K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers, all of whom studied with Philip K. Dick, are considered fathers of modern steampunk, and it was Jeter who coined the term to describe their work.
Homunculus won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1986.
Langdon St. Ives is a man of science and a member of the Royal Society. With the help of his dependable and discreet manservant, St. Ives prefers to spend his time secretly building a spaceship in his countryside silo. But currently he's in London to help his friend Jack Owlesby recover a wooden box containing the huge emerald Jack's father left him for an inheritance. Things get confusing when it's discovered that there are several of these boxes that all look the same and all contain something somebody wants. Soon St. Ives, Jack, and a host of other friends and enemies become embroiled in a madcap adventure featuring a toymaker and his lovely daughter, a captain with a smokable peg leg, the scientists of the Royal Society, an evil millionaire, a dirigible steered by a skeleton, a tiny little man in a jar who may be an alien, a cult evangelist who wants to bring his mother back to life, a love-spurned alchemist who keeps trying home remedies to cure his acne, and a lot of carp and zombies.
As you may have guessed, Homunculus is zany and completely over-the-top in the right kind of way. The villains are meant to be caricatures -- one of them is hunchbacked and another sneakily lurches around England with his head wrapped in unraveling bandages. They do stupid things such as leaving the curtains open while animating corpses for the evangelist to claim as converts, and tip-toeing up dark staircases carrying bombs with lit fuses. Blaylock's bizarre but deadpan humor, in the absurdist British style (though Blaylock is American), was my favorite part of the novel. Even though Homunculus is packed with action and very funny when it's in its farcical mode, the pace sometimes lags and the shallow characters can't make up for it when that happens. Fortunately, that's not often. The final scene is a screwball melee as all the heroes and villains, and thousands of London's citizens, turn out to witness the story's climax.
I listened to Audible Frontiers' version of Homunculus which was narrated by Nigel Carrington who was a brilliant choice. There are a lot of similar characters in Homunculus, but Mr. Carrington made them distinguishable. He also hit exactly the right tone with the humor which ranged from deadpan to black comedy to zany farce. In fact, I would specifically recommend the audio version of Homunculus just because Nigel Carrington's performance was a large factor in my enjoyment of the book.
If you're in the mood for a surreal British comedy in the vein of Monty Python or Fawlty Towers, James P. Blaylock's Homunculus will fit the bill nicely. Published in 1986, this is one of the earlier steampunk novels. In fact, Blaylock, along with friends K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers, all of whom studied with Philip K. Dick, are considered fathers of modern steampunk, and it was Jeter who coined the term to describe their work.
Homunculus won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1986.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
Blaylock Commits a Cardinal Sin
Homunculus was a mish-mash of dull characters and obscure references to their work within the plot structure. Homunculus was the second book in a trilogy. Read more
Published on December 1, 2010 by slovenia
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lovely Novel
Blaylock is so very mad in such a charming manner that, short of religious objections to the subject matter (mad science, murder, grave-robbing), it is uite simply impossible to... Read more
Published on September 1, 2009 by D. Bost
4.0 out of 5 stars
An entertaining romp
This book is not for the faint of heart for it involves fish-guts, dead/undead bodies, and on top of that it involves 1870's London. Read more
Published on January 15, 2009 by T. Tufte
4.0 out of 5 stars
Over-the-Top Steampunk Lunacy
This book is sort-of an absurdist parody of steampunk thrillers. Don't expect this to be anything like Tim Powers' "The Anubis Gates" or, IMHO, the work of Alan Moore or Grant... Read more
Published on October 29, 2007 by rampageous_cuss
2.0 out of 5 stars
Flaky
I didn't particulary like this book. The characters are either indistinguishable from one another, or completely over the top (or some combination thereof). Read more
Published on March 16, 2005 by E. K. M. Busch
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nice ride
If you enjoy teh Anubis Gate youl like this book. Far out fantasy.
Published on June 4, 2003 by S. Ramirez
2.0 out of 5 stars
Horribilus
"Homonculus" is Blaylock's unhappy attempt to maintain apace with his friends Tim Powers and K.W. Read more
Published on August 9, 2002 by Patrick Burnett
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