by TimPowers (Author), Tim Powers (Author)
Brendan Doyle is a twentieth-century English professor who travels back to 1810 London to attend a lecture given by English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This is a London filled with deformed clowns, organised beggar societies, insane homunculi and magic. When he is kidnapped by gypsies and consequently misses his return trip to 1983, the mild-mannered Doyle is forced to become a street-smart con man, escape artist, and swordsman in order to survive in the dark and treacherous London underworld. He defies bullets, black magic, murderous beggars, freezing waters, imprisonment in mutant-infested dungeons, poisoning, and even a plunge back to 1684. Coleridge himself and poet Lord Byron make appearances in the novel, which also features a poor tinkerer who creates genetic monsters and a werewolf that inhabits others' bodies when his latest becomes too hairy.
Format: paperback
Publisher: Gollancz
Published:
ISBN 10: 0575077255
ISBN 13: 9780575077256
Book Overview: A fast-paced and exciting tale of a nineteenth century London that never was by a master storyteller
Prizes: Winner of Philip K. Dick Award 1984. Shortlisted for British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel 1986.