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Time Hunter #7
Time Hunter: Peculiar Lives: Peculiar Lives
From the pen of Mr Erik Clevedon, Peculiar Lives is another 'scientific romance' along the lines of The Coming Times and The Star Beasts. Exotic colour is added by the character of an American Negro detective, Honore Lechasseur, and his delightful English companion Miss Blandish. Once a celebrated author of 'scientific romances', Erik Clevedon is an old man now. But his fiction conceals a dangerous truth, as Honore Lechasseur and Emily Blandish discover after a chance encounter with a strangely gifted young pickpocket. Born between the Wars, the superhuman children known as 'the Peculiar' are reaching adulthood - and they believe that humanity is making a poor job of looking after the world they plan to inherit... Part mystery, part detective story, part dark fantasy, part science fiction... original adventures in time and space.
Kindle Edition
First published May 30, 2005
18 people want to read
About the author
Philip Purser-Hallard
44 books52 followersPhilip Purser-Hallard is a widely published and occasionally acclaimed author, editor and critic. He has written four Sherlock Holmes novels for Titan Books, all favourably reviewed in Publishers Weekly, and the Devices trilogy of urban fantasy thrillers for Snowbooks, as well as a plethora of shorter fiction. He is a founding editor of and frequent contributor to the Black Archive, a series of critical monographs about individual Doctor Who stories.
From his webpage:
"In my writing I like to reimagine and question established cultural icons, hence my four Sherlock Holmes novels for Titan Books. Writing dialogue between Holmes and Lady Bracknell, from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, may be the high point of my career. The Devices trilogy, published between 2013 and 2016, considers some of the icons of British mythology that I loved as a child, and how they relate to the political reality of Britain in the 21st century."
From his webpage:
"In my writing I like to reimagine and question established cultural icons, hence my four Sherlock Holmes novels for Titan Books. Writing dialogue between Holmes and Lady Bracknell, from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, may be the high point of my career. The Devices trilogy, published between 2013 and 2016, considers some of the icons of British mythology that I loved as a child, and how they relate to the political reality of Britain in the 21st century."
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 19, 2020
The time hunter series is a intriguing series to be honest - loosely connected to the Doctor Who universe it takes the premised created in a previous book (cabinet of light) and expands it in to its own storyline.
The series consists of a number of standalone adventures which all share a common theme and hints of a larger story (which I assume will be addressed in the finale). The series is written by a number of famous and recognised authors in this field.
Now why repeat what is pretty much what I have said before - well in this case there is good cause. you see this story is presented in the style of a fictional author recounting events in his own work (for example citing a fictional previous book) - true it is no a new technique however in this series it is something new and for me adds a different view point to what is going on.
I think for me this is the first book in the series that reads and feels like an episode from a TV show - do not get me wrong the other books have their merits but they feel like books where this could almost be the story a show was actually based on.
So for me this series has some great ideas and some very clever styles of presentation - some work some do not, in this case there were some great ideas and some missed opportunities - however to understand those I think you will need to read not only this book but the entire series (at least so far).
The series consists of a number of standalone adventures which all share a common theme and hints of a larger story (which I assume will be addressed in the finale). The series is written by a number of famous and recognised authors in this field.
Now why repeat what is pretty much what I have said before - well in this case there is good cause. you see this story is presented in the style of a fictional author recounting events in his own work (for example citing a fictional previous book) - true it is no a new technique however in this series it is something new and for me adds a different view point to what is going on.
I think for me this is the first book in the series that reads and feels like an episode from a TV show - do not get me wrong the other books have their merits but they feel like books where this could almost be the story a show was actually based on.
So for me this series has some great ideas and some very clever styles of presentation - some work some do not, in this case there were some great ideas and some missed opportunities - however to understand those I think you will need to read not only this book but the entire series (at least so far).
April 21, 2008
If Echoes was reminiscent of Sapphire and Steel, this installment in the Time Hunter series recalls The Tomorrow People, with its superpowered teenagers who are the next stage of human evolution. Though I suspect that Phillip Purser-Hallard actually drew most of his ideas from the work of Olaf Stapledon rather than from the 1970s kids' TV series. (One of the characters in Peculiar Lives is one Erik Clevedon, a science fiction author clearly modelled on Stapledon.)
Purser-Hallard tackles the unpleasantness of the social Darwinist thinking implicit in the idea of "the next stage of human evolution". (I've always thought it was vaguely discomfiting the way The Tomorrow People basically proposed to its audience that the vast majority of them were evolutionary dead ends. I suppose it got away with it by playing on everyone's willingness to imagine that they would be one of the special ones.) This book pretty much puts to rest any fears I might have had that the Time Hunter novellas' short word count would mean that they were simplistic or short on ideas.
On the other hand, the short word count does mean that some of the characters seem to experience moral epiphanies or changes of heart rather abruptly. And because we spend much of this story seeing the two leads of the Time Hunter series, Honore and Emily, through the eyes of others, I suspect it would be even more effective if I'd read all of the previous books in the series, and knew these characters better. But the book was more than good enough to convince me to seek out some of the earlier volumes in the series.
Purser-Hallard tackles the unpleasantness of the social Darwinist thinking implicit in the idea of "the next stage of human evolution". (I've always thought it was vaguely discomfiting the way The Tomorrow People basically proposed to its audience that the vast majority of them were evolutionary dead ends. I suppose it got away with it by playing on everyone's willingness to imagine that they would be one of the special ones.) This book pretty much puts to rest any fears I might have had that the Time Hunter novellas' short word count would mean that they were simplistic or short on ideas.
On the other hand, the short word count does mean that some of the characters seem to experience moral epiphanies or changes of heart rather abruptly. And because we spend much of this story seeing the two leads of the Time Hunter series, Honore and Emily, through the eyes of others, I suspect it would be even more effective if I'd read all of the previous books in the series, and knew these characters better. But the book was more than good enough to convince me to seek out some of the earlier volumes in the series.
April 16, 2026
I do greatly enjoy H G Wells, so I was delighted when I started reading this to find it to be in that distinctive style of the scientific romance.
But I need to confess: I've never read any Olaf Stapledon. I know this is a shocking deficiency, and I do intend to remedy it. Last and First Men has been on my to-read shelf for some time; it may have just promoted itself to the top of list (especially as tomorrow is Tuesday, when I have the joy of a two hour each way train commute).
So, I'm probably missing a huge chunk of the homage in this. I'll need to re-read once I've consumed some Stapledon. But it was a thoroughly enjoyable read on its own, even though I might only be appreciating it at a superficial level.
This was sufficiently enjoyable that I now want to read the rest of the Time Hunter series. Great, what I really needed was ten more works to add to the 179 (at the time of typing) that are waiting, waiting, waiting for me to get to them...
But I need to confess: I've never read any Olaf Stapledon. I know this is a shocking deficiency, and I do intend to remedy it. Last and First Men has been on my to-read shelf for some time; it may have just promoted itself to the top of list (especially as tomorrow is Tuesday, when I have the joy of a two hour each way train commute).
So, I'm probably missing a huge chunk of the homage in this. I'll need to re-read once I've consumed some Stapledon. But it was a thoroughly enjoyable read on its own, even though I might only be appreciating it at a superficial level.
This was sufficiently enjoyable that I now want to read the rest of the Time Hunter series. Great, what I really needed was ten more works to add to the 179 (at the time of typing) that are waiting, waiting, waiting for me to get to them...
April 1, 2023
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/peculiar-lives-by-philip-purser-hallard/
A book in the series based on Honoré Lechasseur aka the Time Hunter, a character from Daniel O’Mahoney’s Telos novella, Cabinet of Light, which I see I read in April 2017 but never wrote up here. This particular one is a bit of a homage to Olaf Stapledon; I’m afraid I felt it was too invested in a fandom that I don’t share, and it went over my head.
A book in the series based on Honoré Lechasseur aka the Time Hunter, a character from Daniel O’Mahoney’s Telos novella, Cabinet of Light, which I see I read in April 2017 but never wrote up here. This particular one is a bit of a homage to Olaf Stapledon; I’m afraid I felt it was too invested in a fandom that I don’t share, and it went over my head.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews