Dr. Ignacio Narbondo is a character invented by steampunk author James P. Blaylock, an alum of the English Department at California State University, Fullerton. In studying Mary Shelley’s invention of the “mad scientist” motif at the beginning of sf, we pause to regard our own homegrown vivisectionist, corpse-animating, brilliant madman.
Dr. Narbando is the longtime nemesis of Professor Langdon St. Ives, the protagonist of many of Blaylock’s stories. Dr. Narbondo appears in several of the author’s novels, including The Digging Leviathan (1984), Homunculus (1986), Lord Kelvin’s Machine (1992), The Ebb Tide (2009), The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs (2011), Zeuglodon (2012), The Adventure of the Ring of Stones (2014), The Aylesford Skull (2013), and Beneath London (2015). In the novels Zeuglodon and The Digging Leviathan, Dr. Narbondo has transformed himself into Dr. Frosticos, or Frost, so named because he had been frozen and eventually thawed (Dyar). Though Blaylock traces his influence for Dr. Narbondo to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Hyde of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Castro), one might argue that Narbondo is a cross between Hyde and Victor Frankenstein, who shares with Narbondo an interest in vivisection and animating corpses.
The character of Ignacio Narbondo traces back to Blaylock’s 1984 story “The Idol’s Eye.” Narbondo festures as a character who is fossilized and has one of his ruby eyes stolen. Narbondo spends the rest of the story seeking revenge on St. Ives, who he blames for his stolen eye. In an interview with Alasdair Stuart, Blaylock states that he was writing his novel Homunculus at the same time as he was writing “The Idol’s Eye,” and he incorporated Narbondo into the novel because he needed a villain. Notably, the Dr. Narbondo of Homunculus is actually not the same Narbondo who appears in “The Idol’s Eye.” In the interview, Blaylock states that he decided to make the Narbondo of “The Idol’s Eye” Ignacio Narbondo’s father.
In Homunculus, Narbondo is largely seen through the eyes of his assistant Willis Pule, who despises Narbondo. Pule likes to think of himself as the mastermind behind their evil schemes, which is comedic as he is always doing Narbondo’s bidding. In this novel, we see Narbondo as a hunchbacked mad-scientist who is working to reanimate corpses. Homunculus does not provide much insight into his backstory or try to explain why he is evil. However, more recent books in the Narbondo series touch on his history. The Aylesford Skull, which was released in 2013, is the first novel in which the reader gets a glimpse into Narbondo’s past, touching on his family history and especially resentments he harbors towards his mother. Though ultimately the reasons behind his machinations to destroy the world remain unclear, so Dr, Narbando remains a “mad scientist” with roots in the pulp icon as a villain who fuels the plot: the protagonist is, in the main, is our “hero,” the adventurous Langdon St. Ives.
Works Cited
Castro, Adam-Troy. “10 Books That Inspired Steampunk Legend James P. Blaylock’s New Novel.” Syfy, SYFY WIRE, 25 Jan. 2016, www.syfy.com/syfywire/10-books-inspired-steampunk-legend-james-p-blaylocks-new-novel.
Dyar, Amanda. “Exclusive: James P. Blaylock Discusses His Book Re-Releases, Zombies, Time Travel and Much More!” Dread Central, 17 May 2013, www.dreadcentral.com/news/44362/exclusive-james-p-blaylock-discusses-his-book-re-releases-zombies-time-travel-and-much-more/.
Stuart, Alasdair. “Narbondo’s Bane: An Interview with James P. Blaylock.” The Man of Words, 28 Jan. 2013, alasdairstuart.com/2013/01/28/narbondos-bane-an-interview-with-james-p-blaylock/. Accessed 16 Mar. 2018.
FURTHER RESOURCES:
Blaylock on Stevenson’s Influence on Dr. Narbando:
(Source: Blastr Article: Top Ten Books)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
No author’s writing more influenced my own than that of Robert Louis Stevenson. My first Steampunk story, “The Ape-box Affair” is a sort of mélange of Stevenson and P.G Wodehouse. Homunculus, my first Steampunk novel, is even more Stevensonian, and in fact I borrowed characters wholesale from The New Arabian Nights and atmosphere and tone from Jekyll and Hyde. There’s a good deal of Hyde in my own Dr. Narbondo. My main debt to Stevenson, however, has to do with language. Stevenson wrote that he learned to write by “playing the sedulous ape”: that he wrote pieces that mimicked other writers, especially William Hazlitt. I did the same, first with Twain and Steinbeck, later with Stevenson. It’s not hard to hear his voice in my prose, especially in my early work.
Blacklock on the Inspiration for the Character:
(Source: Titan Books Interview)
Langdon St. Ives came into my mind back in the mid 1970s when I wrote my first Steampunk story, “The Ape-box Affair.” His coming to life as a character I attribute to two things: reading that I had done some fifteen years earlier, when I was ten or eleven years old, and reading that I was doing at the time I wrote the story. The first adult book I ever read was The Return of Sherlock Holmes, which I borrowed from my mother’s library one day. I can’t quite say what suddenly prompted me to read real books, but I recall that I very much liked the look of them and the smell of old paper. I was drawn particularly to books with black covers, with gold or red printing on the cover and spine, and with cool-looking frontispiece illustrations. The McClure, Phillips & Co. edition, 1905, scored high in all categories, and so that’s the book I borrowed. I had no idea what “the return” referred to, because I’d never before heard of Sherlock Holmes. I got caught up in the stories, however, despite their being tough to read, particularly the foggy London backdrop, the pipe smoking and other small trappings, the evocative prose, and the exotic characters. Sherlock Holmes loomed large in my imagination ever after, and Langdon St. Ives owes Holmes a debt of gratitude.
When I was in my twenties I undertook to read all of Robert Louis Stevenson, including his letters, plays, ephemera, and anything else I could find. Tim Powers and I used to drive out to Acres of Books in Long Beach once a month or so in order to buy books. The store was vast – several large rooms and a number of small rooms – with only a nod at order. The ceilings were high, with overstock books far out of reach overhead. We soon figured out that no one had messed with those out-of-reach books for years, probably decades, and so when no one was paying attention, we’d climb a few rungs of the wooden cases and pull down likely looking volumes. I found scores of old hardcover books marked at 25 or 35 cents that way, including dusty old Stevenson books. I was a big fan of the stories in Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights, which featured a Holmes-like detective who is secretly the deposed Prince of Bohemia, Prince Florizel, living under the assumed name, Theophilus Goddall. His Watson-like sidekick is his trusted friend Colonel Geraldine. Along with the Stevenson books, I was binging on P.G. Wodehouse (on Tim’s good advice) and it came to me that I badly needed to write a story of my own set in Victorian London, featuring my own detective/scientist/explorer. The result was “The Ape-box Affair,” which is infused with Wodehousian language and Stevensonian plot devices. When I wrote my novel Homunculus several years later, I borrowed Theophilus Goddall wholesale and simply made him a character. In The Aylesford Skull I borrowed Arthur Conan Doyle. As for Dr. Narbondo, the first appearance of Narbondo is in my short story “The Idol’s Eye,” published in the early 1980s. He appears as a stone idol in a Borneo jungle –a petrified human being, actually, with rubies for eyes. When I wrote Homunculus a year or two later, I made Narbondo a living, breathing evil genius in London, at which point I decided that the earlier Narbondo must be a different Narbondo – this new Narbondo’s father, say. There’s evidence of that in The Aylesford Skull. In short, I was too fond of Narbondo to give him up.
Narbondo’s Bane: An Interview with James P. Blaylock
https://alasdairstuart.com/2013/01/28/narbondos-bane-an-interview-with-james-p-blaylock/
And so the petrified Narbondo’s son, Ignacio Narbondo, is St. Ives’s constant enemy. In 1885, in my novel Lord Kelvin’s Machine, Narbondo has a near death experience in which he’s frozen solid. He returns from the almost-dead and reinvents himself as Dr. Frosticos, or Frost. Via an elixir brewed up from the glands of koi fish (koi being famously immortal) and a stolen time machine, he manages to find his way into my novel The Digging Leviathan, set in Los Angeles in the late 1950s and also in my recently published Zeuglodon, the True Adventures of Kathleen Perkins, Cryptozoologist, which seems also to be set in the out-of-time world of The Digging Leviathan. (Steampunk fans, or anyone interested in my books, might also enjoy Zeuglodon. And that, of course, is a shameless plug, although hopefully true.)
Interview with Steampunk Legend Author James P. Blaylock
http://www.thegeekgirlproject.com/2013/05/23/interview-with-james-p-blaylock/
GGP: I’ve seen your St. Ives books referred to both as the St. Ives series and as the Narbondo series. It’s obvious how I think of them, but how do you think of them? Who do you give a starring role, or do you have another series title all together in mind?
Blaylock: I haven’t given much thought to a series title. If I had to choose, it would probably be “The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives” or some such thing. St. Ives will always have the starring role. Dr Narbondo is the great nemesis of St. Ives, and he’s very inclined to step out of the shadows in order to stir up trouble, as we see in The Aylesford Skull, but he sometimes is off on other business while St. Ives goes about his own business unhindered (at least by Narbondo). At the time of “The Adventure of the Ring of Stones,” for example, Narbondo is… engaged elsewhere… due to reasons that would be clear to anyone who has read The Aylesford Skull. There have been other St. Ives adventures that did not involve Narbondo. That being said, Narbondo has had an adventure or two that did not involve St. Ives, but which were made possible when Narbondo contrived to borrow St. Ives’s time machine at the end of Lord Kelvin’s Machine, allowing him to figure into the doings of my novels The Digging Leviathan and Zeuglodon many years later. He might be standing on my own front lawn right now, for all I know, although my dog Pippi isn’t barking, so I suppose I’m safe.
Steampunk Interview: James P. Blaylock
http://garrettcalcaterra.blogspot.com/2013/01/steampunk-interview-james-p-blaylock.html
Calcaterra: You have a penchant for reusing characters and character names in your work: St. Ives, Narbondo, William Ashbless. Are you a closet Tolkien, with boxes and files full of family trees and timelines tracing the St. Ives lineage from the Victorian era to the 1950s and The Digging Leviathan?
Blaylock: In a word, yes, although unlike Tolkien, who seems to have been an intensely dedicated, organized planner and forecaster, I’ve gone at it a little bit haphazardly, and by now the doings of my characters over the years can only be explained by hauling in a time machine, jabbering about multiple universes, and setting off fireworks to distract the reader. Fortunately, there was a time machine in Lord Kelvin’s Machine, and when Dr. Narbondo (going under the name Dr. Frost or Frosticos) arrives in the 1950s Los Angeles of The Digging Leviathan, he’s either made use of this time machine, or has consumed an elixir brewed from carp glands (carp famously being immortal) or both. Edward St. Ives is in fact the great grandson of Langdon St. Ives, which explains, or makes a nod at explaining, why William Ashbless (also an apparent time traveler or immortal) is hanging around with Edward and his brother-in-law William Hastings. To confound the issue, Frosticos also sails his submarine into my recently published novel, Zeuglodon, the True Adventures of Kathleen Perkins, Cryptozoologist, which in a strange way seems to be a corner of the out-of-time world of The Digging Leviathan and of my novel The Paper Grail. None of these connections are important for the casual reader, however. But I’m amused by the thought that a young reader who first discovers my books by tackling Zeuglodon, might be happily surprised to discover The Digging Leviathan or The Paper Grail later on. The connections, I fear, are going to increase as time goes by; in fact they’re already increasing in the sequel to Zeuglodon, which is in its early stages at this point, and is tentatively titled King Solomon’s Ring. I get a big bang out of this stuff. I hope my readers do also, if they catch on to it.
Blaylock on Origins of Steampunk and its connection to CSUF:
(Source: The Nerd Cabinet Interview)
This is a variety of chicken-and-egg question. I was friends with Tim Powers and K.W. Jeter in those days – the mid 1970s – (and still am) and the three of us had all graduated from the same university, all had an avid interest in the Victorian era, and all had grown up reading Verne and Wells and Conan Doyle. We all launched Victorian era stories of one sort or another, hashing over plots in O’Hara’s Pub in downtown Orange. My story, “The Ape-box Affair” made it into print first, but only by virtue of its being a short story, and hence quicker to publish. K.W. followed with his novel Morlock Night, and Tim followed that with The Anubis Gates, which won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award in 1985. My Steampunk novel Homunculus won the award in 1986. It wasn’t until two years later that K.W. coined the term Steampunk in a letter to Locus magazine, which seemed to cement the idea of Steampunk as a sub-genre of science fiction. I wrote “The Ape-box Affair” because I was binging on Robert Louis Stevenson at the time, and was particularly enjoying the stories that make up The New Arabian Nights. I wanted to mess around in a Victorian world of my own inventing.
Science Fiction Encyclopedia Entry: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/blaylock_james_p
On Steampunk-By James P. Blaylock
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-p-blaylock/on-steampunk_b_2494561.html
Administrative Notes: Alexis Shanley and Joshua Newman; Dr. David Sandner (editor)