Infernal Devices (Jeter)

infobox Book |
name = Infernal Devices : A Mad Victorian Fantasy
author = K. W. Jeter
country = United States
language = English
genre = Steampunk, Science fiction
publisher = St. Martin's Press
release_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.

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, agrees to look at the device, although he knows his chances of repairing it are slim at best. 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. His investigation leads him to a strange neighborhood in London, Wetwick, which is 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 recognize as twentieth-century American vernacular. (The stranger is not a time traveler 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.