FREE THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF SPRING HEELED JACK PDF Mark Hodder | 373 pages | 01 Sep 2010 | Pyr | 9781616142407 | English | United States Burton & Swinburne in The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack - PYR Sir Richard Francis Burton—explorer, linguist, scholar, and swordsman; his reputation tarnished; his career in tatters; his former partner missing and probably dead. Algernon Charles Swinburne—unsuccessful poet and follower of de Sade; for whom pain is pleasure, and brandy is ruin! They stand The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack a crossroads in their lives and are caught in the epicenter of an empire torn by conflicting forces: Engineers transform the landscape with bigger, faster, noisier, and dirtier technological wonders; Eugenicists develop specialist animals to provide unpaid labor; Libertines oppose repressive laws and demand a society based on beauty and creativity; while the Rakes push the boundaries of human behavior to the limits with magic, drugs, and anarchy. The two men are sucked into the perilous depths of this moral and ethical vacuum when Lord Palmerston commissions Burton to investigate assaults on young women committed by a weird apparition known as Spring Heeled Jack, and to find out why werewolves are terrorizing London's East End. Their investigations lead them to one of the defining events of the age, and the terrifying possibility that the world they inhabit shouldn't exist at all! With this one book, Hodder has put himself on the genre map. Hodder has brilliantly combined various genre staples - time travel, alternate reality, steampunk - into something you've never quite seen before. His mid-nineteenth-century Britain The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack steam- driven velocipedes, rotorchairs, verbally abusive messenger parrots, a pneumatic rail system, and robotic street cleaners. The book is incredibly ambitious, and the author pulls it off like an The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack pro: not only is the setting exciting and fresh, the story is thrilling and full of surprises. Mark Hodder definitely knows his stuff and has given us steam opera at its finest A great, increasingly complex, plot, some fine characters, and invention that never flags! It gets better and better, offering clues to some of Victorian London's strangest mysteries. This is the best debut novel I have read in ages. I don't think there are very many other ways to put it. His plotting is intricate and intriguing, his voice is superb, the characters are engaging and original, and all of it is so unexpectedly fun. There is no better adjective to describe such all-around greatness. Don't come into this book expecting any less. Hodder has arrayed in his book the full panoply of steampunk riffs… Layering this cake with a frosting of mystery, suspense, and time-travel shenanigans, he has created a compulsively readable romp that recalls the best of Tim Powers and James Blaylock… and the plot unfolds with a The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack cleverness. A former BBC writer, editor, journalist, and Web producer, Mark has worked in all the new and traditional medias and was based in London for most of his working life untilwhen he relocated to Valencia in Spain to de-stress and write novels. He can most often be found at the base of a palm tree, hammering at a laptop. Mark has a degree in cultural studies and loves British history toin particulargood food, cutting-edge gadgets, cult TV ITC forever! Sign up for the Pyr Newsletter Your privacy is important to us. We will NOT share your email address with anyone! London, Reviews "The usual superlatives for really clever fantasy imaginative, mind-bending, phantasmagorical aren't nearly big enough for this debut novel. Buy This Book. The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack (Burton & Swinburne, book 1) by Mark Hodder A case he'd read about from two or three years ago; something concerning a girl being attacked by -- by a ghost which escaped by taking prodigious leaps -- by a thing that breathed fire -- by a creature known as -- Spring Heeled Jack. Taking the lead role is the explorer and writer Sir Richard Francis Burton. Part steampunk, part alternate history, with a liberal dollop of detective thriller, it is a melting pot that has the potential to produce something tasty, or a nauseating mess. From the outset, it will be evident to anyone reasonably well versed in British history, that what Mark Hodder presents is a lovingly re-imaged version of the Victorian Age. The life, and subsequent times, of Sir Richard Francis Burton, almost immediately diverges from established history. In the main due to the activities of Spring Heeled Jack; a character who beats up Burton early on, or from his own perspective, somewhat later. The central premise here is one man, Edward Oxford, attempting to erase a stain on the history of his family, using a time suit of his own design. What Oxford wants to do is stop his infamous ancestor from ever making what was, in true history, an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Queen Victoria. Unfortunately, the mission goes disastrously wrong, accidentally causing the demise of the monarch. What follows is an out and out romp, where The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack is always more important than substance. Sir Richard Francis Burton, who becomes the King's Agent, is tasked with finding Spring Heeled Jack, and putting an end to his unpleasant activities, many of which involve assaulting young girls. Even in its altered state -- for example, Brunel invented geothermal power about three hundred years before its time -- what should have been Victorian England is well realised. In particular the squalor of the age, and its acceptance by a populace who knew their place. In Mark Hodder's version there are, among other inventions, steam-powered gyroscopically stabilised velocipede bicycles, and armchairs attached to personal gyrocopters. Spring Heeled Jack, literally bouncing around the era, and losing his grip on sanity by the day, at first attempts to put things right. But he is eventually driven to concentrate on ensuring his own survival. Even if that means raping his own ancestor! Most of the ideas work to propel the story along, although some trip it up a little. The joke of having genetically altered parrot messengers predisposed toward abusing sender and recipient quickly became old, as did the notion of door-to-door mail delivery dogs. Who would want to receive mail that had dog slobber all over it. Rather than sprinkling the story with added fun, as I have no doubt was the author's intention, sometimes I got the feeling that he'd become carried away, and where the little things were concerned, was poorly served by his editor. Tongue-in-cheek and mostly light-hearted, this is the kind of book where disbelief is sometimes suspended by a thread, and details are intentionally overlooked. Anyone wanting to know exactly how Florence Nightingale manages to graft brains together, or the technicalities of the advanced life-support mechanism that allows Isambard Kingdom The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack to survive his own death, will be sadly disappointed. Similarly, there is no attempt to explain why or how some of the The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack minds of a generation descend into a clinical madness which, in true history, was not seen until the evil of Josef Mengele. But as time travel -- re-imaged history -- steampunk novels go, this was a blast of alternate Victoriana, peppered with a cast who The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack from credible to Dick Van Dyke and back again. An appendix is provided in which the author helpfully gives short explanations as to the differences between his fiction and the real lives of those esteemed The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack whose names he has borrowed. Quite how much longevity there is for Burton, the King's Agent, and Swinburne, the masochistic poet, remains to be seen. But I can recommend this title to readers who like pre-information age adventure, laced with a few smiles and topped off with very British eccentricity. In reality, he's an English bloke who lives on an island, reading, writing and throwing chips to the seagulls. Drop by his web site at www. If you find any errors, typos or anything else worth mentioning, please send it to editor sfsite. A former BBC writer, editor, journalist, and Web producer, he has worked in all the new and traditional medias and was based in London for most of his working life untilwhen he relocated to Valencia in Spain to de-stress and write novels. He can most often be found at The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack base of a palm tree, hammering at a laptop. Mark has a degree in cultural studies and loves British history toin particulargood food, cutting-edge gadgets, cult TV ITC forever! A review by Nathan Brazil 'A memory stirred. The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack - Wikipedia The honeycomb of narrow, uneven passages, bordered by the most decrepit and crowded tenements The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack the city, was flowing with raw sewage and rubbish of every description, including occasional corpses. The stench was overpowering and both men had vomited more than once. Time and again the two The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack were approached by girls barely out of childhood, who materialised out of the fog with matted hair and bare feet, smeared with excrement up to their The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, covered only by a rough coat or a thin, torn dress or a man's shirt which hung loosely over their bones; who offered themselves for a few coppers; who lowered the price when refused; who begged and wheedled and finally cursed viciously when the men pushed past.