1988 SF, eighth of its series. People are being torn apart in
Victorian London, or simply drained of blood. How will the Time
Commandos solve the problem?
Well, it's very obviously a trap for them, which they mostly fall
into. But others get involved too: Arthur Conan Doyle, H G Wells, Bram
Stoker, and there's even a brief appearance by Oscar Wilde and Bosie.
There are many people, and many moving parts, to this plot, and much
of the book is spent by people chasing each other around London and
occasionally getting murdered. (Series villain Nikolai Drakov has
engineered a vampire and a werewolf with infectious DNA elements, so
some the victims get turned against their former friends.) One
character is even introduced as "my favorite deus ex machina".
Hawke largely resists the urge to lecture, at least after the opening
chapters, and it's pleasing in a book of this era to see the Chinese
community painted as victims defending themselves rather than as
sinister plotters.
We return to the idea used in The Nautilus Sanction that wiping the
memories of creative people is unreliable; so Stoker gets his
inspiration for Dracula, and Wells his Dr Moreau and time traveller
and invisible man. I find this a little trite, not to mention raising
the creative process to some kind of mystical event, but hey ho; it's
done with some sympathy, at least.
While some of the moments are excellent, there's relatively little
sense of progress overall.
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