Customer Reviews

Homunculus

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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 excelent (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...

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

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 Morrison. Think of the Firesign Theater doing Fu Manchu, or an epic version of one of Michael Palin's "Ripping Yarns," and you'll just about have it. I'd say if you loved "The Life of Brian" or "Time Bandits" you'll enjoy this loony nonsense from the end of Blaylock's whimsical period.

A techno-mystic airship is orbiting the late-19th-century earth; aboard may be an imprisoned extraterrestrial. When it crashlands in Victorian London all hell will break loose since its secrets are sought by the Royal Society, a fraudulent evangelist and his reanimated mother, a fiendish vivisectionist and his corrupt assistant, an evil millionaire, and a team of (other) assorted eccentrics led by the square-jawed scientist-adventurer, Langdon St. Ives. Can St. Ives and his super-competent valet Hasbro keep the alien homunculus out of the claws of the villainous Ignacio Narbondo? Can they help poor Jack Owlesby receive his long-delayed inheritance? And can they rescue Jack's beautiful fiancee from the monstrous fate implied by the dreaded Marseilles Pinkle?!? Well sure. The question is, how crazy are things going to get?

Perhaps a little TOO crazy for some folks. Blaylock has, IMHO, a tendency to pull his punches and here he throws a lot to compensate, keeping us off-balance with reanimated corpses, a lost starship, longevity serum, an exploding rocket silo, secret sewers, bizarre brothels... The plot isn't so much complex as distracted with subplotting! If you love lively lunacy, however, you'll like this.

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 not like this book.

And, in fact, if your religion does cause objections to this book, I advise that you find a new religion. It's that good.

I didn't particulary like this book. The characters are either indistinguishable from one another, or completely over the top (or some combination thereof). The villians are stereotypically ridiculous, and there's just way too much fish-gutting for my squeamish tastes. May I suggest The Anubis Gates instead?

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.

On the other hand, it has entertaining characters ranging from hunchbacks to crazed priests to tinkers and intellectuals. The language tends to get a bit thick, but this better serves to describe the oddness that entails within.

If you prefer your tales a bit more serious this may not be the book for you. However, if you do enjoy the occasional weird event or humorous encounter this book is great!

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. Blaylock's cardinal sin was that he did not create a novel in Homunculus that could stand alone. That is, in order to understand the characters' machinations one had to have read the first book in the trilogy. Bad boy! As an example of what can be done, one can read the second book in Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy (The Girl who Played with Fire) without having read book one (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and enjoy a completely satisfying literary experience. Not quite half way through Homunculus I gave up in disgust and tossed it. I appreciate that James Blaylock and Tim Powers are friends but Powers' cover blurb on Homunculus was such a pack of lies that I'll never again trust a review by him.

If you enjoy teh Anubis Gate youl like this book. Far out fantasy.

"Homonculus" is Blaylock's unhappy attempt to maintain apace with his friends Tim Powers and K.W. Jeter, at a time when each was writing a pastiche set in a London of the 19th century. Jeter produced the amusing and strange "Infernal Devices", Powers wrote the now-legendary and award-winning "Anubis Gates" and Blaylock, well, Blaylock wrote this mess.

James Blaylock seems to suffer from the worst kind of Chris Columbus fantasy imaginings. Plot slowing down? Throw in a big, anachronistic machine! Don't waste time with character development, just dress 'em up and make 'em talk funny. That'll do it.

Overall, Blaylock seems unable to rise above mediocrity.