Scan barcode
A review by ericbuscemi
Homunculus by James P. Blaylock
3.0
It was my turn to pick for book club, and wanting to pick something different, I thought of this steampunk classic that I had already loaded onto my Kindle but hadn't yet read. It was short at around 250 pages, it was available for $2.79 on the Kindle, and it had won a Phillip K. Dick award for distinguished science fiction. So why then, out of seven people, did only two of us, myself included, manage to finish it?
Well for one, it had a hell of an in medias res opening. I mean the story really should have started fifteen years prior, and the prologue could have done more to set up the plot and expectations, and not just the tone and mood. That being said, about of the third of the way in, I started getting traction as to what on this alternate earth was going on and began appreciating the absolute lack of anything resembling an infodump anywhere in the entire novel. However, many of my fellow bookclubbers abandoned ship before this point, and I really can't blame them.
This read was not a typical 250 page breeze, which surprised me -- possibly because most steampunk novels I have read, such as [b:The Leviathan Trilogy|11563056|The Leviathan Trilogy|Scott Westerfeld|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328342601s/11563056.jpg|16446997] and [b:Boneshaker|1137215|Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century, #1)|Cherie Priest|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1398725701s/1137215.jpg|1124460], are aimed at a YA audience? This read much slower, nearly as slow as the ultimate grandfather to the steampunk genre, [a:Jules Verne|696805|Jules Verne|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1322911579p2/696805.jpg].
The shame of most of my book club not finishing it, though, is that this story picked up steam in a parabolic curve, exponentially becoming more fun and exciting and leading to a spirited, and appropriately ridiculous, climax, which served to tie up almost all of the loose ends, as well as shedding light on any remaining mysteries accumulated during the process of reading the novel.
There is humor to be found in here. Although it is not a comedy, there are enough hijinks, oddities and playfully macabre antics to keep things lively, as one may expect in a novel where an airship driven by a skeleton is in low orbit around the earth for years. There is also an interesting MacGuffin shell game, where instead of having just one macguffin -- the one containing the homunculus -- there are four, and they get swapped around to a dizzying point where even the reader cannot keep track of which is which. What is not in this novel, however, is enough characterization of its ensemble cast, not even of the nominal protagonist, Langdon St. Ives. And the antagonists are each more of a caricature than the next -- Narbondo, the mad scientist that reanimated corpses, is a hunchback, for example.
To sum it up, if you can get into this novel, which takes some good amount of patience, there is a worthy payoff. But this is not the novel I would go about gifting someone thinking of exploring the steampunk genre, at risk of turning them off to it completely, as I fear I may have done with my book club.
Well for one, it had a hell of an in medias res opening. I mean the story really should have started fifteen years prior, and the prologue could have done more to set up the plot and expectations, and not just the tone and mood. That being said, about of the third of the way in, I started getting traction as to what on this alternate earth was going on and began appreciating the absolute lack of anything resembling an infodump anywhere in the entire novel. However, many of my fellow bookclubbers abandoned ship before this point, and I really can't blame them.
This read was not a typical 250 page breeze, which surprised me -- possibly because most steampunk novels I have read, such as [b:The Leviathan Trilogy|11563056|The Leviathan Trilogy|Scott Westerfeld|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328342601s/11563056.jpg|16446997] and [b:Boneshaker|1137215|Boneshaker (The Clockwork Century, #1)|Cherie Priest|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1398725701s/1137215.jpg|1124460], are aimed at a YA audience? This read much slower, nearly as slow as the ultimate grandfather to the steampunk genre, [a:Jules Verne|696805|Jules Verne|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1322911579p2/696805.jpg].
The shame of most of my book club not finishing it, though, is that this story picked up steam in a parabolic curve, exponentially becoming more fun and exciting and leading to a spirited, and appropriately ridiculous, climax, which served to tie up almost all of the loose ends, as well as shedding light on any remaining mysteries accumulated during the process of reading the novel.
There is humor to be found in here. Although it is not a comedy, there are enough hijinks, oddities and playfully macabre antics to keep things lively, as one may expect in a novel where an airship driven by a skeleton is in low orbit around the earth for years. There is also an interesting MacGuffin shell game, where instead of having just one macguffin -- the one containing the homunculus -- there are four, and they get swapped around to a dizzying point where even the reader cannot keep track of which is which. What is not in this novel, however, is enough characterization of its ensemble cast, not even of the nominal protagonist, Langdon St. Ives. And the antagonists are each more of a caricature than the next -- Narbondo, the mad scientist that reanimated corpses, is a hunchback, for example.
To sum it up, if you can get into this novel, which takes some good amount of patience, there is a worthy payoff. But this is not the novel I would go about gifting someone thinking of exploring the steampunk genre, at risk of turning them off to it completely, as I fear I may have done with my book club.