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.
From the Back Cover
Welcome to 1870s London populated by the usual suspects: costermongers and fishwives, worldly philosophers and new messiahs, inspired inventors and mad scientists, millionaires and grave robbers.
In this 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.
This is the world of the Homunculus - a tiny man from another world whose strange powers have kindled the flames of unreason and made him the focus of the deadliest of all intrigues.
Meeting in Powers' Pipe and Tobacco Shop - where the aroma of Old Bohemia fills the air and the port is always smooth - the Trismegistus Club may well hold the fate of the world in its hands.
