A good deal of controversy arose late in the last century over what has been referred to by the more livid newspapers as The Horror in St. James Park or The Ape-box Affair....

So begins the first chronicle in the long and often obscure life of Langdon St. Ives, Victorian scientist and adventurer, respected member of the Explorers Club and of societies far more obscure, consultant to scientific luminaries, and secret, unheralded savior of humankind. From the depths of the Borneo jungles to the starlit reaches of outer space, and ultimately through the dark corridors of past and future time, the adventures of Langdon St. Ives invariably lead him back to the streets and alleys of the busiest, darkest, most secretive city in the world -- London in the age of steam and gaslamps, with the Thames fog settling in over the vast city of perpetual evening. St. Ives, in pursuit of the infamous Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, discovers the living horror of revivified corpses, the deep sea mystery of a machine with the power to drag ships to their doom, and the appalling threat of a skeleton-piloted airship descending toward the city of London itself, carrying within its gondola a living homunculus with the power to drive men mad....

This omnibus volume contains the collected Steampunk stories and novels of James P. Blaylock, one of the originators of the genre, which hearkens back to the worlds of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, a world where science was a work of the imagination, and the imagination was endlessly free to dream.

A flaming meteor over the Yorkshire Dales, a long-lost map drawn by the lunatic Bill Cuttle Kraken, and the discovery of a secret subterranean shipyard beneath the River Thames lead Professor Langdon St. Ives and his intrepid friend Jack Owlesby into the treacherous environs of Morecambe Bay, with its dangerous tides and vast quicksand pits. They descend beneath the sands of the Bay itself, into a dark, unknown ocean littered with human bones and the remnants of human dreams. In this tale of murder, infamy, and Victorian intrigue, the tides of destiny shift relentlessly and rapidly as the stakes grow ever higher and the pursuit more deadly…

En el más oscuro rincón de un callejón del Londres victoriano, el jorobado loco Narbondo y su ayudante devuelven los muertos a la vida.Al acogedor calor de una tabaquería, los filósofos callejeros del Club Trismegisto se estremecen de temor mientras escuchan los desvariados recuerdos de uno de sus colegas.En las mohosas y húmedas ruinas de un cementerio en lo alto de una colina, el único sonido que altera la quietud de la noche es el raspar de una pala contra las podridas maderas de un ataúd largo tiempo olvidado.Y, por encima de la bruma londinense, surcando incansable el estrellado cielo, un dirigible sigue su viaje de décadas, tripulado por un esqueleto e impulsado por la voluntad de un hombrecillo —un homúnculo— con la habilidad de conducir a los hombres a la locura…Con esta irónica, mordaz y apasionante novela, que ganó a su publicación el premio Philip K. Dick a la mejor novela del año publicada en paperback, James P. Blaylock se sitúa a la cabeza de los escritores más imaginativos de ciencia ficción. Dotado de un enorme sentido de la fantasía, es autor también de la novela The Digging Leviathan, y de La Tierra de los sueños, aparecida en la colección de fantasía de esta misma editorial.