Infernal Devices (Jeter)
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| Infernal Devices : A Mad Victorian Fantasy | |
| Author | K. W. Jeter |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Steampunk, Science fiction |
| Publisher | St. Martin's Press |
| Publication date | 1987 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 282 pages |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-312-00706-X |
Infernal Devices is a steampunk novel by K. W. Jeter, published in 1987.
[edit] Plot summary
The novel takes place primarily in Victorian London.
The story begins as a mysterious Brown Leather Man enters George's watch shop with a strange device in need of repair, claiming it was made by George's father, a brilliant watchmaker skilled in all forms of clockwork devices. George, who has inherited his father's shop, but not his father's talent, takes the device anyway. George is quickly dragged into an ongoing conflict involving the Royal Anti-Society, the Godly Army and the Ladies Union for the Suppression of Carnal Vice. He also explores Wetwick, an little-known district of London inhabited by denizens who are a hybrid of humans and fish; this portion of the novel is perhaps an uncredited tribute to H. P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".
Another of George's customers is an impatient man who wears blue-glass spectacles and uses a slang which is strange to George as a Victorian Englishman but which modern readers will recognise as twentieth-century American vernacular. (The stranger is not a time traveller but a Victorian Englishman who possesses a device which enables him to view what is, for him, the future; he has learned late twentieth-century slang through lip-reading.)
As the story develops, George realizes that his father was more skilled than even he knew; his father had begun experimenting with building clockwork humans, finishing with an automaton who is an exact double of George himself, but which possesses superior sexual abilities and a skill with the violin comparable to Paganini. Inevitably, a woman abducts George in the mistaken belief that she has captured his clockwork twin.
