Raleigh & Sons
an excerpt

Louisa waved her arm wildly in a large arc, and the towering metal thing bent down to inspect them, gently waving back with its hand and nearly blowing them over with the effect. The robot found a footing on the Fields, crouched down with its hand outstretched, and froze with another off-key blast. A panel in the upper torso slid open, and leaping out was the largest man Pierre had ever seen.
He could have been the Colossus of Rhodes, with such a formidable presence. The man was big, a size that suggested he should have been winning awards for pounding railroad ties, not wearing a swirling purple duster and spats. His obviously ebullient mood made him only seem bigger, as if he were puffing out his chest, only upon closer inspection Pierre saw that he was simply good-humored. The only thing that was off about his gentlemanly appearance were the goggles, a decidedly tarnished pair with lenses that telescoped out like cake layers, with black glass at the end. The man bowed in half but kept his back straight to stare at them through the goggles and grin, a strange and slightly terrifying vision of crazed welcoming.
"Dr. Raleigh, this is your nephew!" called Louisa over the noise, for the robot was still churning away and releasing curlicues of smoke that matched the ones on the doctor's gold waistcoat.
"Hi!" Pierre's uncle said in clear reply, for his voice carried well. "Hi, hi, hi!"
"Hi," said Pierre loudly.
"You're Rita's kid, right?"
"Yes!" Dr. Raleigh straightened suddenly, and Pierre watched him grin again, his teeth white against a darkened face with the sun blazing around him like a halo.
Pierre had once heard from his mother about his uncle, namely that he was alternately brilliant and bizarre. The truth was that his entire family was that way, being a group of people with too much talent and too little care for people who weren't geniuses. Pierre's own father was a man of infinite possibilities in the realm of music, and was obsessed with mathematically deriving the perfect tone of a full pit orchestra. He had written so many books on the subject that Pierre had been driven from ever practicing respectable instruments and instead purposely stockpiled things like hand-organs, calliopes, and Jew's harps, things his father had dismissed as being far too commonplace for the type of "iridescence" perfection could discover.
His mother Rita focused her energies on cosmological entities, searching for the cloudy purple worlds beyond the sky and spending most of the day asleep with a black curtain pinned against the windows. Pierre saw little of her, and only knew that his troublemaking was exacerbated when her input was required; losing sleep made her turn quietly foul. She was neutral on the subject of Dr. Raleigh, and had only told her son that he built things and was searching for an alternative fuel source. His interest lay apart from the thick black smoke coal produced, she had said once, nearly close to the addition Like he's ever going to find it that she may have suspected in the back of her head.
Pierre's other relatives, uncles, aunts, cousins, and various elderly people, were a collection of amusing anomalies on the human landscape, a group focused in their dedication to passions and discoveries. They worked in blackened metals and the purities of science, even in abstractions and the arts. They were not above social interactivity, but something about their detachment from one another in terms of collaborative scientific effort brought up a dull anxiety in Pierre. They weren't going anywhere with their work, or presenting it to the masses of people in the world desperate for something new. His family kept inventions and new things to themselves, and his uncle Dr. Raleigh was a distant figure never spoken of. He was their equal, but apparently with a practicality unfamiliar in their family history, and so a hundreds-mile gap was in order to preserve some kind of unspoken balance.