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The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Feh. I haven't run across a time-traveler this toe-curlingly incompetent since the last time I read Connie Willis.

Promising start, irritating and disappointing everything else. I like steampunk, I like alternate history, I like historicals featuring famous people. This had all of the above going for it . . . and proceeded to make them all deeply obnoxious. This doesn't just feature Sir Richard Burton (the explorer, Jim, not the actor), it scrapes up every godforsaken contemporary of his and shoehorns each one into an awkward bit part. And don't get me started on the steampunk alt history. I will accept a lot of absurd things in this genre without a blink, but that's from books with the sense to smile and handwave. This book gives an exact date for historical divergence, and a mechanism, and an explanation for the alternative track science takes. And when you do that, you open yourself up to me looking at your explanation, laughing myself sick, and then going, "wait . . . you weren't kidding? Seriously? . . . Oh."

It's steampunk, kids. Do not explain it. It will not end well.



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