It is 1861 and Sir Richard Burton, the infamous explorer, spy, and author, is in disgrace.  Mark Hodder takes this very real and historically authentic action hero and boldly changes the backdrop. Now the Eugenicists with their specially-grown flora and fauna duel with the Engineers and their brilliant constructs to see who can transform London faster and more bizarrely.   Messages are delivered by sentient greyhounds who share the streets with steam-powered "velocipede" penny-farthings; single-person rotochairs speed across a sky already dotted with enormous swans laboratory-grown so large they can tow along passengers in kite boxes in Mark Hodder's first installment of the Burton & Swinburne adventures, "The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack."

It is here that Burton is assaulted by Spring-Heeled Jack who makes several nasty comments about Burton's failed life and preemptively orders the disgraced man to stay out of Jack's business before leaping upward and blinking away into nothingness. The problem is, for Burton, that some of what Jack talks about hasn't happened yet.  Burton the explorer must now explore his own possible future hopelessly enmeshed with events, people, and possibilities that he could not have otherwise known.

The "Swinburne" of the title is the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, a masochistic young Rake who is brought into Burton's orbit by the unfolding of altered events. Where Burton is robust, Swinburne is petite and thin.  Where Burton has proven himself innumerable times in combat and covert operations, "Algy" has, at the start of this book, yet to test his mettle. He looks towards Burton's investigations as means towards this end, regardless of the price he may have to pay.  This is a Victorian buddy-cop adventure complete with steam power, occultism, political intrigue and an assassination attempt on Queen Victoria. 

Hodder doesn't leave us guessing for long that this is a time-travel story, but works to keep his characters appropriately slow to grasp the full implications of Jack's influence on their world. The action moves along at a brisk pace but never fails to demonstrate where this England differs from our own, taking advantage of the new toys to the best possible effect.  Various factions are laid out on the board and suffer their share of victories and defeats over the course of the story. The pages are chock-full of historical name-dropping in a very well intentioned way that does the plot good service and the ending promises that Burton and Swinburn will return (in "The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man")**. 

As a final tribute to the historical figures represented within, Hodder includes an appendix of brief, unaltered, biographies to place the cast back into their proper perspectives.  While a completely optional point of reading, the appendix will help you not only brush up on your "famous Victorians" as Jack would call them, but give you a slightly deeper appreciation of the author's construction of his strange new London.

Being a fan of time travel stories, I entered into "The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack" with some trepidation.  Far too often time travel is used as an escape hatch for an author who has painted himself into a corner.  Instead of being a "deux ex machina" for escaping the plot, Hodder gleefully stirs his narrative thicker and thicker with each successive spring-heeled time jump and makes it clear that the events of this novel will have greater, deeper ramifications to be explored in later novels.  Even when Jack's fate is made clear, the resulting stew leaves nothing but an intriguing open mystery for Burton to unravel even as he contemplates the revealed unreality of his world.

 ** Editor's Note: Stay tuned for the Professor's next article in which this installment of Burton & Swinburn shall be reviewed. ~Dr.Q

 Professor Upsidasium is a contributor to Steampunk Chronicle.  He uses the Visuatronic Audiographic Steampunk Archive to capture images and sounds of events he has been to and individuals he has had the pleasure of speaking with.  You can follow his ramblings on Twitter or explore the current iteration of the archives on YouTube.