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[[quoteright:190:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/james_p_blaylock.jpg]]
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James P. Blaylock is an American fantasy author. He is a friend of the authors Creator/KWJeter and Creator/TimPowers, and shares with Powers a CreatorInJoke involving the poet William Ashbless.

Recurring characters in his works include the Victorian gentleman adventurer Langdon St. Ives and the villainous Ignacio Narbondo.
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!!Works by this author include examples of:

* CreatorInJoke: When Powers and Blaylock were in college together, they invented a fake poet named "William Ashbless" to satirize the quality of their college's literary magazine. He ended up appearing as a character in both of their novels, entirely independently, featuring in Blaylock's novel ''The Digging Leviathan''.
* EvilCripple: The villainous Ignacio Narbondo is a crippled hunchback due to a childhood illness. Played with in ''Lord Kelvin's Machine'', wherein a time-traveller visits his child self and treats him with medicine from the future. Result: in the present, Narbondo is now no longer crippled, nor ever has been... but he's still just as evil.
* FoodPills: Langdon St. Ives invents ''coffee'' pills decades before (and much, much better than) instant coffee was developed in RealLife. On several occasions in ''Lord Kelvin's Machine'', he uses them to bribe coffee-loving ObstructiveBureaucrat or Mook characters for favors.
* HeliumSpeech: In ''Homunculus'', the oxygenator device spews out blasts of helium and chlorophyll whenever it's activated. Willis Pule mistakes it for another MacGuffin and steals it, only to be hit in the face by one of these blasts when he tries to open it, freaking out when he hears his own altered voice.
* TheIgor: Subverted in ''Homunculus'', where the hunchback creeping around the spooky laboratory actually '''is''' the MadScientist, Ignacio Narbondo.
* IncredibleShrinkingMan: People who visit future worlds via the mystical Solstice in ''Land of Dreams'' emerge into a later era to find themselves much smaller relative to things around them. Human beings gradually "acclimate" and expand to an appropriate size for humans in the world they're visiting, but their clothes stay small; when Jack and Skeezix travel into future Rio Dell, they're forced to borrow some dolls' dresses or else go naked when they outgrow the garments they'd arrived in.
* KlatchianCoffee: In ''The Disappearing Dwarf'', there is a scene on a riverboat where the coffee comes from an urn which has been brewing continuously for ''13 years''. The urn is never emptied. Water and coffee are added as needed. One of the passengers makes the mistake of having a third cup. The coffee is so strong that he starts hallucinating.
* OurHomunculiAreDifferent: The title creature in ''Homunculus'' [[spoiler:is not a synthetic creation at all, but rather a tiny alien]].
* PocketProtector: In ''Homunculus'', Bill Kraken is shot at point-blank range and survives because the bullet is blocked by the book of philosophical anecdotes he's been reading. He takes it from his jacket and checks what phrase the bullet failed to penetrate, but to his disappointment, the quotation doesn't seem pertinent.
* SatchelSwitcheroo: In ''Homunculus'', four of Keeble's mechanical boxes are eagerly sought by the heroes and by several different villains. In this case, ''all'' of them have value to ''somebody'', but characters in search of a particular box's contents (an emerald, an oxygen-maker, a perpetual-motion device, and the title creature) keep snatching the wrong one.
* {{Steampunk}}: Blaylock's works such as ''Homunculus'' and ''Lord Kelvin's Machine'' were among the type samples Creator/KWJeter had in mind when he coined the term.
* TheUnreveal: In ''Homunculus'', a strange mechanical gadget called a Marseilles Pinkle is left at the site of a kidnapping. A worldly character implies that it has some perverse erotic function, but the viewpoint character is too naive even to guess what that might be, and the Pinkle's description certainly doesn't sound like a sex toy, leaving the reader in the dark as well.
* WakingUpAtTheMorgue: In ''Homunculus'', Willis Pule is knocked unconscious during a scuffle with zombies, then hauled away with the bodies left behind when they de-animate. Pule's skin had been stained pale green in an earlier incident, so whoever collected the bodies can't be wholly blamed for mistaking him for yet another corpse.
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