 | 10:24 pm - The Somnambulist
I see that Jonathan Barnes writes Dr Who. I must then conclude that the echoes of Aaronovitch- particularly Peter's out of body experiences in the earliest times of London- which I find in The Somnambulist probably work the other way around, even if Aaronovitch never cited him as a source.
I also have the feeling that I've read this book before in some other book, but couldn't say which of many steampunk novels it might have been. All of them, maybe, possibly even starting with The Man Who Was Thursday. One aspect of never remembering a plot once I've finished a book is that the book only exists while I'm reading it; after that nothing's left of it but a memory of the smell of smoke and a presumption that once my eyes watered, as it were. So many similar elements: night, fog, detectives, inspectors, detective inspectors, hypnotists, grotesques, prostitutes, secret societies, and the occasional automaton. The Somnambulist lacks only the automata. It does not, for that matter, say why the Somnambulist is called the Somnambulist, since he never sleep-walks at all.
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