the strange affair of spring heeled jack by mark hodder

Socially, we have the Libertines who adhere to a morally dubious celebration of freedom calling for a society without restrictive laws that celebrates beauty, art and the freeing of humanity from the burdens of social conventions. Both of these two group bear much in common with the “Clankers” and the “Darwinists” from Scott Westerfeld’s excellent YA 'Leviathan' series, though there is a much more gothic, Vandermeer/Mieville feel to them in this work.

The Technologists create modern marvels ranging from brass robots, mechanical trash-burning litter-crabs and one-man flying contraptions called “rotochairs.” The Eugenicists splice and tinker to create specialized, genetically-engineered species to act cheap labor. Charles Darwin has all but murdered religion, London is choking on the pollution that is the byproduct of its runaway industrial innovations and the parliament-controlled government is a powder-keg of factions. Set in 1861 in an Victorian Albertian England, Mark Hodder has created one of the most enticingly strange and intriguing steampunk worlds I have come across in my literary travels.

In other words, a great blend of prim, proper and the freakishly bizarre.somebody pass the hookah, this one’s gonna get weird. This super debut novel is like a sweet, dainty cup of mild English tea.if it was spiked with Absinthe, poured into a heavy brass goblet and served with Laudanum-laced cookies shaped like medical experiments gone awry. 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! 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. They stand at 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. Sir Richard Francis Burton-explorer, linguist, scholar, and swordsman his reputation tarnished his career in tatters his former partner missing and probably dead.Īlgernon Charles Swinburne-unsuccessful poet and follower of de Sade for whom pain is pleasure, and brandy is ruin!

The strange affair of spring heeled jack by mark hodder