Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon (Burton & Swinburne in) [Paperback]

Mark Hodder (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 24, 2012 | Series: Burton & Swinburne

From the winner of the Philip K. Dick Award 2010

AFRICA, 1863.

SIR RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON
AN EXPLORER, A LINGUIST, A SCHOLAR, AND THE KING'S AGENT OR IS HE A PUPPET BEING MANIPULATED BY FORCES HE CANNOT UNDERSTAND?

A RACE TO FIND THE SOURCE OF THE NILE!

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
A FAMOUS YOUNG FLAME-HAIRED POET, THRILL-SEEKER, AND FOLLOWER OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE. FOR HIM PAIN IS PLEASURE, AND BRANDY IS RUIN!

BACK TO WHERE THE ADVENTURE BEGAN!
It is 1863, but not the one it should be. Time has veered wildly off course, and moves are being made that will lead to a devastating world war. Prime Minister Lord Palmerston believes that by possessing the three Eyes of Naga he'll be able to manipulate events and avoid the war. He already has two of the stones, but he needs Sir Richard Francis Burton to recover the third. For the king's agent, it's a chance to return to the Mountains of the Moon to make a second attempt at locating the source of the Nile. But a rival expedition led by John Hanning Speke stands in his way, threatening a confrontation that could ignite the very war that Palmerston is trying to avoid!

Caught in a tangled web of cause, effect, and inevitability, little does Burton realize that the stakes are far higher than even he suspects.

A final confrontation comes in London, where, in the year 1840, Burton must face the man responsible for altering time—Spring Heeled Jack!

Burton and Swinburne's third adventure completes the three-volume story arc begun in The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack and The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Enthralling, dizzying and as impressive as they come." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Burton and Swinburne's third adventure is filled with eccentric steam-driven technology, grotesque characters, and bizarre events." --The Geek Curmudgeon

About the Author

Mark Hodder is the author of The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack-winner of the Philip K. Dick Award 2010-and its sequel, The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man. He's the creator and caretaker of the Blakiana website (http://www.sextonblake.co.uk), which he designed to celebrate, record, and revive Sexton Blake, the most written-about fictional detective in English publishing history. 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 until 2008, when he relocated to Valencia in Spain to de-stress and write novels. He has a degree in cultural studies and loves British history (1850 to 1950, in particular), good food, cutting-edge gadgets, cult TV (ITC forever!), Tom Waits, and a vast assortment of oddities.

Product Details

• Paperback: 399 pages
• Publisher: Pyr (January 24, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1616145358
• ISBN-13: 978-1616145354
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #342,443 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mark Hodder is descended from John Angell, a pirate who sailed with Captain Kidd. According to family legend, Angell invested most of his ill-gotten gains in land, particularly in Angell Town near Brixton in London. Anyone who can provide irrefutable legal evidence that they're descended from Angell will inherit the land, which is estimated to now be worth at least 64 million pounds. Over the course of generations, members of the family, seeking to gain the fortune, have lost one in trying to prove the link, and hordes of people who have no connection with the family at all have adopted the name in order to make a claim. As a result, the family tree is extremely tangled and a legal connection to the pirate's treasure is almost certainly impossible to establish.

Mark's great-grandfather was Doctor Albert Leigh, who went to medical school with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The two men were great friends--they joined the Freemasons together--and Sir Arthur presented Albert with a complete set of Sherlock Holmes first editions, all inscribed: To dear Leigh, from your friend Doyle. They would fetch a fortune at auction today. Unfortunately, upon Leigh's death in 1944, his housekeeper, an actress, made off with the volumes and they've never been seen since.

Thus it is that two great fortunes have eluded Mark Hodder.

Denied money-for-nothing and the luxury, idleness, and indulgences it would bring, Mark lives in Spain and writes novels. His first Burton & Swinburne adventure--THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF SPRING HEELED JACK--was published in 2010 and promptly won the Philip K. Dick Award. Sequels followed: THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE CLOCKWORK MAN, EXPEDITION TO THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON, and THE SECRET OF ABDU EL YEZDI. Two more will complete the series.

In A RED SUN ALSO RISES, a non-Burton & Swinburne novel, Mark pays homage to his favourite childhood author, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The adventures of Macallister Fogg are available on Kindle; currently: THE MASTER MUMMER'S MUMMY, GREAT GREAT GREAT (AND SO FORTH) UNCLE DRAGOSLAV, and THE HETERODYTHERMALINE HIGHWAYMAN.

Mark has a short story--THE LOSS OF CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE--in the anthology ENCOUNTERS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, and another--THE BLOOD OF OUR LAND--in ZENITH LIVES!

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars The End of Burton and Swinburne? February 12, 2012

By J. Wiles Parker VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

If you have not picked up a previous Burton and Swinburne book by Mark Hodder, be sure to do so before reading this one because it relies heavily on previous knowledge of the first two volumes. While Hodder does rehash a few details here or there, it's more for the purposes of getting to the plot of what is the end of the Burton and Swinburne trilogy. (I, for one, do not believe there will be a fourth despite speculation. Though I would rather like to reread the trilogy with the events of this book in mind.)

Burton, tasked by Lord Palmerston to find the final Eye of Naga, heads to Africa with many familiar characters in tow. Africa is where it all began for Burton and where he hopes all his troubles will come to an end. However, to do so he has to deal with some nasty Prussians and a host of hostile native tribes. Hodder injects parts of a future timeline into the telling of this main one in order to have the multiple parts of Burton's story intersect at the exact time necessary in what proves to be an impressive use of pacing if not a challenge to keep track of which timeline one is reading about. Fortunately the two are separate enough that the threads can be followed, but it is not always clear immediately and may require a small measure of reorientation.

Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon relies a lot more on slogging through Burton and co. trudging through a seemingly endless landscape of desert and jungle. That gets repetitive after a time, particularly as they keep having to pay tribute to the various tribes and seem to get in a string of conflicts. Many of the interesting support characters drop out along the way (for various reasons), so the story centers, increasingly, on Burton more than anyone. The fact the previous books brought in all those characters made the stories more interesting, so losing the support characters is distressing, particularly when one is rather attached to some of them. It also narrows the story considerably on Burton making it feel like the end will never quite come. When the end does come, it is a bold decision on the author's part and makes me think he had it in mind from the get go.

All in all a clever finish in some ways. Mountains of the Moon fell short for me in a few areas, perhaps because I was expecting something along the lines of the first two books, but it is still a solid volume and employs history in an interesting way along with some new familiar faces. Be prepared for some hard science fiction when the steampunk elements drop out. Hopefully you've paid attention to some of the smaller details of the timelines in the first two volumes because it all comes to a head in this one and it's not to be missed if the previous volumes were read and enjoyed.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Good Completion to the Trilogy! February 14, 2012

By Jennifer McBride

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is very much tied to the previous two -- I don't see how it can be read independently, quite frankly. Themes that were raised in the first two books and characters that were introduced in the first two books all appear in this concluding edition. At one point, it seems that 90% of the characters over the last two books, in fact, are passengers on a massive aircraft! It's a great read, and Hodder has no qualms of showing how problems that began to arise in the first book have exploded into pure insanity, both in London and in Africa. I very much enjoyed the cast of characters and zany situations that Hodder created over the years, and I secretly always hoped that Burton would find himself heading over to America to participate in the Civil War/Post-Civil War years. Still, if this is how it is to end -- it's worthy ending to a great trilogy. Thank you Mr. Hodder. I'll be recommending it to all my friends who enjoy Steampunk!

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Expedition Into Art July 24, 2012

By Daniel Myers VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I disagree most strongly with the other reviewers of this book on two terribly important points:

1:) I do NOT think it necessary for the reader of this book to also have read, as I have done, the previous two novels in this trilogy.

2:) This book, is not, au fond, a "steampunk" book - as I understand the term - and thus not to be recommended to fans of the genre, generally speaking.

To elaborate, this book is an entirely different sort of novel in its ultimate theme and in its pacing than the two preceding it. True, it has nearly all the same characters and the same alternate reality, alternate REALITIES, I should say. But the previous two novels were essentially entertainment - Very good entertainment in the case of the first book, I should say. - But still, mere entertainment, from which one stood back, looked on and had a jolly good time of it. Here, in this book, Hodder actually creates a world in which the reader becomes engulphed. The caricatures become characters, and the surreal events seem all too real.

The book is meditative, poetic, realistic and, ultimately, tragic. As noted by other reviewers, the great part of the novel takes place in Africa, rather than the familiar/unfamiliar world of alternate London. The pacing is deliciously slow and the style unflamboyant. The scenes of trench warfare are actually more affecting than books styling themselves realistic fiction - Sebastian Faulks's ludicrously overrated novel Birdsong, for instance - and, time and again, the book offers up meditative passages like these lines from the character H. G. Wells:

"The problem, as I see it, is that we don't truly don't understand the nature of the past. We mythologise it. We create fictions about actions performed to justify what we undertake in the present. We adjust the cause to better suit the effect. The truth is that the present is, and always will be, utter chaos. There is no story and no plan."

Passages, in other words, that make one pause and ponder rather than roll along in a "steampunk" sort of fashion. Most importantly, the book's overarching theme might be said to be human grief, loss and death. My guess, from reading the other reviews, is that other readers completely skipped the poetry of Swinburne interspersed throughout the book. But this inclusion is the most important part of the book and the most amazing feat pulled off by author Mark Hodder: He takes extended excerpts and entire poems from the real Swinburne such as "The Garden of Proserpine", "A Forsaken Garden" etc. and fits them perfectly into the narrative! I should have said that it couldn't be done, but Hodder astounds in doing so.

The epilogue to the book is Swinburne's powerful poem, "A Lamentation" in its entirety. It mirrors this book's effect as a whole, a threnody to all men lost in time and space and unable to control the outcome of events.

Some lines from a particular poem kept coming to mind whilst reading this book by Swinburne's poetic hero, Shelley, from his "Mont Blanc":

"Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live."

This book, despite its garish cover, and the two preceding fun but not deeply affecting books is actually, for those receptive to such things - Quelle Horreur! - literature: Deep, moving literature.

Readers beware!