The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack
It is 1861, and Albertian Britain is in the grip of conflicting forces. Engineers transform the landscape with bigger, faster, noisier and dirtier technological wonders; Eugenicists develop specialist animals to provide unpaid labour; Libertines oppose restrictive and unjust laws and flood the...
show more
It is 1861, and Albertian Britain is in the grip of conflicting forces. Engineers transform the landscape with bigger, faster, noisier and dirtier technological wonders; Eugenicists develop specialist animals to provide unpaid labour; Libertines oppose restrictive and unjust laws and flood the country with propaganda demanding a society based on beauty and creativity; while The Rakes push the boundaries of human behaviour to the limits with magic, sexuality, drugs and anarchy. Returning from his failed expedition to find the source of the Nile, explorer, linguist, scholar and swordsman Sir Richard Francis Burton finds himself sucked into the perilous depths of this moral and ethical vacuum when the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, employs him as âKing's Spy.â His first mission: to investigate the sexual assaults committed by a weird apparition known as Spring Heeled Jack; to find out why chimney sweeps are being kidnapped by half-man, half-dog creatures; and to discover the whereabouts of his badly injured former friend, John Hanning Speke.Accompanied by the diminutive and pain-loving poet, Algernon Swinburne, Burton's investigations lead him back to one of the defining events of the age: the brutal assassination of Queen Victoria in 1840; and the terrifying possibility that the world he inhabits shouldn't exist at all.
show less
Format: paperback
ISBN:
9781906727208 (1906727201)
Publish date: April 1st 2010
Publisher: Snowbooks
Pages no: 511
Edition language: English
Series: Burton & Swinburne (#1)
Not bad but it felt like the author was trying too hard to be clever.In an Albertian rather than Victorian England Engineers make noisy technology; Eugenicists develop animals for particular purposes; Libertines oppose rigidity and support creativity while the Rakes try to outdo each other in libera...
By all accounts I should have enjoyed this. It was fairly intriguing, but the writing and most of all the dialogue was hard to follow. Nothing seemed to happen within the first few chapters, except someone was shot and someone else was quite saddened by the event. Alternative history with steampunk ...
It's in the pile http://www.goodreads.com/photo/user/1084698-jana?photo=804461Review to come ...eventually.
Esta es una novela fascinante que abrió mi perspectiva a un sinnúmero de posibilidades literarias. Está escrita en la tradición del Steampunk clásico... pero con un giro potente que agrega al relato una característica más "convincente" (entendiendo el concepto dentro del contexto propio de la obra)....
[a:Mark Hodder|3222611|Mark Hodder|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1315597718p2/3222611.jpg]'s debut novel, [b:The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack|7293120|The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack (Burton & Swinburne, #1)|Mark Hodder|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327931939s/7293120.jpg|8590363], ...