Lord Kelvin's Machine - Softcover

Blaylock, James P.

3.47

425 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0441499724 ISBN 13: 9780441499724

Publisher: Ace, 1992

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Determined to avert the doom of his beloved wife, scientist and detective Langdon St. Ives sees his only hope for doing so in Lord Kelvin's time machine, but the diabolical Dr. Ignacio Narbondo has other plans for the invention. Reprint.

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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.

From Publishers Weekly:

Blaylock ( The Paper Grail ) returns to the Victorian setting of his award-winning novel Homunculus in this tale of obsessive grief, time travel, mad scientists and gentlemanly adventure. The first of the three parts finds amateur scientist Langdon St. Ives despondent after a rainy chase of his nemesis, the evil Dr. Narbondo, ends with the death of his lady love, Alice. But St. Ives turns his grief to determination as he strives to thwart Narbondo's scheme to shift the earth into a collision with a passing comet. In the second part, an array of colorful, eccentric villains (including a revived Narbondo) compete to use Lord Kelvin's electromagnetic machine in an elaborate (and unlikely) blackmailing plot. In the novel's final section, St. Ives gives in to his private sorrow, using the machine to travel back in time in an attempt to kill a younger Narbondo and thus save Alice's life. Blaylock provides plenty of action--perhaps too much--and his characters are, if not realistic, entertaining, but this novel is not among his best work. The three episodes never cohere, and the driving force behind the plot (St. Ives's grief) is explored in detail only in the concluding section. Though St. Ives's journey through time is very well handled, at once playful and thoughtful, the sum of these three parts is less than a whole.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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