The Return of the Discontinued Man: The Burton & Swinburne Adventures

Thrilling continuation of the brilliant Burton & Swinburne series. Steampunk in its best historical context. Start from the begining of this series and work your way through a complex, bewildering and utterly absorbing adventure that steals your time away.

Perfect! Just the book I wanted. In excellent condition. Arrived quickly.

My fiance is glued to each page. Historical Steampunk. :)

In this, the fifth volume of Mark Hodder’s steampunk alternative timeline, Sir Richard Francis Burton and poet Algernon Swinburne are faced with a sad dilemma. The massive clockwork body of scientist Isambard Kingdom Brunel has ceased to function. With it, the life of Brunel becomes discontinued. Due to the black diamond fragments in his mechanical brain, he is technically alive, just discontinued. The Nimtz generator built by Charles Darwin and Charles Babbage is capable of time travel, connected to the Time Machine invented by HG Wells. However a transfer of power at exactly nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February somehow manages to have repercussions across every possible timeline. In effect, it is what first enabled Edward Oxfordn, AKA Spring-heeled Jack to come back in time to stop his ancestor from attempting to kill Queen Victoria, which in a struggle between Jack and Burton results in the Queen being killed, fracturing reality. Burton has already traveled in alternate timelines, and knows that there are infinite possibilities in infinite combinations, and only one would be the restoration of the natural timeline. Still, Burton, Swinburne, Wells and company decide they need to travel to February fifteenth at precisely nine o’clock in the year 2202, the year Spring-heeled Jack first jumped back in time to stop him. They form The Cannibal Club as a support system, there to meet them when they stop and aware of the ultimate goal of the voyagers. We are taken on a wild ride through time with stops ever so often to take on supplies and sometimes to totally change vehicles as improvements have been made. The Nimtz generator from the first time-ship must be removed and installed in the new and improved ship. As they travel further into time, London changes from the London of 1860 to a London with enormous skyscrapers. The gap between the haves and the have not’s grows larger and is indeed cultivated to the degree that genetic engineers modify the lower class to do specific jobs. This makes them less human and they are forbidden to areas above the smog and disease where the elite live. Further on, pig-humanoids in Spring-heeled Jack uniforms patrol the streets where the underclass live, dealing out swift death to anyone who dares question their lot in life. An mis-encounter with these pigs leaves Swinburne and another time-voyager dead. When the actual target date and time is reached, they have a showdown with Norton in the late place they would have looked for him! Hodder folds his origami universe around alternate history and steampunk to create a masterpiece of comingled worlds as a chef would build a multi-layered cake. Real and imaginary characters stride side by side down the avenues of Hodder’s prose like a well-oiled machine. The result is very like a butterfly effect, except that the time-jump of Edward Oxford from February fifteenth, 2202 was responsible for the technology and the need to time-jump back from February fifteenth, 1860 to prevent the original plan in a dramatic paradox! I give this book five stars out of five! Be sure to read the first four books in this series: The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack, The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man, Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon, and The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi. Quoth the Raven…

Fabulous series just gets weirder and weirder. Sorry i hadnt a clue what was going on for most of this book. The swinburne character has devolved into a cartoon joke whose every appearance annoyed the hell out of me, the jumping wildly about in time is confusing and unless youve read earlier books you wont have faintest idea whats going on. Im hoping next one is better!