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Pastworld Ian Beck Books

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Pastworld Ian Beck Books

In the year 2048, London has created a theme park called Pastworld, in which the whole city of Victorian London is rebuilt under a vast dome. Life as it was in the 1800s is recreated for tourists to experience, complete as if time stood still. Visitors arrive via large airships that float above the dome and lock on to a hatchway that deposits them into an environment where they will experience history as they could never have imagined. Tourists must pay costly ticket fees and pass tests of authenticity to enter Pastworld. They must dress in period clothing and carry nothing inside that is from the future. This is a high security environment, and tourists breaking the law will be subject to criminal justice as it was at the time. If you are unlucky to be found guilty of any crime, you will be tried and jailed if not hung for your misdeeds.

Complete with automatically timed fog, night twinkling stars, sunrise and sunset, visitors to Pastworld feel every nuance of Victorian life and will not believe they are within an artificial world. Authentic vendors, street merchants, clopping horses pulling carriages on cobblestone streets beneath gaslights, pick- pockets, prostitutes, and rag and bone men, all walk the streets as paid residents providing the show. Nightly thefts, muggings and even staged murders complete the picture as one blends into the past of London as if that era never ended. We readers along with the tourists, also enjoy, or are horrified by, a black cloaked mysterious killer, a Buckland creation gone horribly wrong that was intended to allow a first hand encounter with a Jack-the-Ripper-like madman called the Fantom.

The main plot of this wonderfully creative story revolves around a girl named Eve. She is a pretty blond blue-eyed young woman raised by a man named Jack who cares for her and protects her. She is never allowed out alone, and must never venture into Pastworld without him. She oddly has no memories of her childhood and lives in fear, as Jack warns her often that there are people out to harm her. Feeling constricted she one day runs away to join the circus, and soon realizes, all within Pastworld is not what she was taught. Her circus friends give her a rude awakening as they inform her that she is living in a faux world. Jack never told her the truth, that this London was a sham, and that another world outside the dome existed. The other side of this tale regards a father and son who arrive as visitors. Lucius Brown, an original imagineer of Pastworld who created a lot of the early mechanisms and side effects for the park, is here on a mission to contact Jack about an urgent threat to Eve and to the success of Pastworld. His son Caleb never knowing the details about his father's early work here, soon learns the cold hard facts as within their first day, his father is kidnapped and he himself is accused of murder.

Many mysteries are served up to the reader as to who Eve is. How she is tied to Caleb and linked to some extraordinary and horrifying experiments from the early creation days of Pastworld, will have you flipping the pages quickly as this story is quite inventive and engaging. The lives of Caleb and Eve become seriously threatened. Much chaos, murder and mayhem have them fighting for their lives against the Buckland organization and from the famous Fantom who is hunting them down. This is a creative and marvelous blend of The Phantom of the Opera, Ridley Pearson's Kingdom Keeper, and Herve Jubert's Dance of the Assassin. I loved this entertaining novel and hope the author pens more for a series of other Pastworld themes. Part Victorian mystery, part horror, part Sci-fi Steam-Punk, this was 100% fun.


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Pastworld Ian Beck Books Reviews

Pastworld is a theme park that is run by the Buckland Corporation. It is a complete authentic reproduction of 17th century London. Everything is authentic, the dress, the lack of electricity, even the 17th century laws. Everyone who visits Pastworld has to be authentic, right down to the luggage they carry and the toiletries they use, the entire theme park has been designed that way.

But despite the fact that Pastworld has a few electronic security measures, crime runs rampant within the park. Underground "unofficial" beg and steal from the "gawkers" or visitors to the park, and sometimes do worse than just steal however. There is a notorious criminal that is terrorizing the park. He's known only as the "Fantom" and he murders his victims before removing organs and heads to terrorize the city. But the Fantom has more in mind than just causing some discomfort to the park gawkers, he's looking for someone. A young girl who has no idea she's living in a theme park, someone who can help him carry out his evil plot...

To start off with, I liked the general theme of Pastworld. It sort of reminded me of a cross between "The Truman Show" and a Charles Dickens/Sherlock Holms mystery novel. I thought Ian Beck had a lot of good ideas going for Pastworld.

However, I just could not get into Pastworld. First off, I felt that it was overly violent for a YA audience. I get blood, that's fine, but dismembering, decapitations, and removing organs? Really? I got the idea with the murders, I felt the extra embellishments of violence were unneeded to make the point.

I also felt zero connection to the characters. I found it annoying that the character of Eve, someone who was central to the entire plot of the book was only written about in diary format. Pastworld kept skipping from third person to first person and it distracted from the plot as opposed to adding to it. I just felt that the characters were sort of glossed over in an attempt to further the plot. I didn't feel like any of them had any depth and because of that, I really stopped caring.

Overall, I found Pastworld to be pretty disappointing. It's a shame really because Ian Beck had a really great and original idea that unfortunately just didn't come to fruition for me.
Lots of good about this book. Interesting premise, well-done background and description of the creepy amusement park setting.

The only downside is what I complain about all the time. Too many words. Many of the passages and scenes felt repetitive. I lost forward motion in a few places. Sort of like slogging through the swamp hoping to find the elusive rare orchid. I persevered, but I really wish it was cut by a few thousand words. The ending was neither surprising nor dramatic given the premise.

If this were a self-pub, then I could be more forgiving, but it's published by Bloomsbury. What exactly are their editors doing? Clearly not cutting the chaff from a book that would have been better with a scalpel-like editing. After all, the Fantom would have done so.

So I'm waffling here. Good enough to finish because of concept and delivery, but not good enough to be enthused.
I went into this purchase intrigued with the concept that I read on the preview here on . While at times it was somewhat hard to follow where teh author was going in the book there was enough mysticism to get me through to the end.

After I read it and let it begin to sink in I found that I enjoyed the book even better as I reread some of the chapters that at first seemed somewhat fuzzy when reading it though the first time.

While I would recommend this for older young adults (14-17) due to the complexity of plot and some macabre I feel that the journey is worth it.
In the year 2048, London has created a theme park called Pastworld, in which the whole city of Victorian London is rebuilt under a vast dome. Life as it was in the 1800s is recreated for tourists to experience, complete as if time stood still. Visitors arrive via large airships that float above the dome and lock on to a hatchway that deposits them into an environment where they will experience history as they could never have imagined. Tourists must pay costly ticket fees and pass tests of authenticity to enter Pastworld. They must dress in period clothing and carry nothing inside that is from the future. This is a high security environment, and tourists breaking the law will be subject to criminal justice as it was at the time. If you are unlucky to be found guilty of any crime, you will be tried and jailed if not hung for your misdeeds.

Complete with automatically timed fog, night twinkling stars, sunrise and sunset, visitors to Pastworld feel every nuance of Victorian life and will not believe they are within an artificial world. Authentic vendors, street merchants, clopping horses pulling carriages on cobblestone streets beneath gaslights, pick- pockets, prostitutes, and rag and bone men, all walk the streets as paid residents providing the show. Nightly thefts, muggings and even staged murders complete the picture as one blends into the past of London as if that era never ended. We readers along with the tourists, also enjoy, or are horrified by, a black cloaked mysterious killer, a Buckland creation gone horribly wrong that was intended to allow a first hand encounter with a Jack-the-Ripper-like madman called the Fantom.

The main plot of this wonderfully creative story revolves around a girl named Eve. She is a pretty blond blue-eyed young woman raised by a man named Jack who cares for her and protects her. She is never allowed out alone, and must never venture into Pastworld without him. She oddly has no memories of her childhood and lives in fear, as Jack warns her often that there are people out to harm her. Feeling constricted she one day runs away to join the circus, and soon realizes, all within Pastworld is not what she was taught. Her circus friends give her a rude awakening as they inform her that she is living in a faux world. Jack never told her the truth, that this London was a sham, and that another world outside the dome existed. The other side of this tale regards a father and son who arrive as visitors. Lucius Brown, an original imagineer of Pastworld who created a lot of the early mechanisms and side effects for the park, is here on a mission to contact Jack about an urgent threat to Eve and to the success of Pastworld. His son Caleb never knowing the details about his father's early work here, soon learns the cold hard facts as within their first day, his father is kidnapped and he himself is accused of murder.

Many mysteries are served up to the reader as to who Eve is. How she is tied to Caleb and linked to some extraordinary and horrifying experiments from the early creation days of Pastworld, will have you flipping the pages quickly as this story is quite inventive and engaging. The lives of Caleb and Eve become seriously threatened. Much chaos, murder and mayhem have them fighting for their lives against the Buckland organization and from the famous Fantom who is hunting them down. This is a creative and marvelous blend of The Phantom of the Opera, Ridley Pearson's Kingdom Keeper, and Herve Jubert's Dance of the Assassin. I loved this entertaining novel and hope the author pens more for a series of other Pastworld themes. Part Victorian mystery, part horror, part Sci-fi Steam-Punk, this was 100% fun.