Mark Hodder sold a new steampunk novel to Editorial Director Lou Anders at Pyr. Titled Burton & Swinburne in The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, the book is the first of a planned series, and is tentatively scheduled for publication in Fall 2010.
Talking about the purchase, Anders says it’s “the first Victorian-set steampunk I’ve acquired, (as opposed to Weird West, 1920s era America, or a secondary-world fantasy settings). I have been looking for a Victorian novel that would stand out from the crowd, and I was immediately drawn to the way in which Mark justified the steampunk elements of his uchronia, which all descend from a certain key change in our own history (rather than simply being used as set dressing). The worldbuilding is exceptionally well thought out.”
The story is set in 1861, “and the British Empire is in the grip of conflicting forces. Engineers transform the landscape with bigger, faster, noisier, and dirtier technological wonders; Eugenicists develop specialist animals to provide unpaid labour; Libertines oppose restrictive and unjust laws and flood the country with propaganda demanding a society based on beauty and creativity; while The Rakes push the boundaries of human behaviour to the limits with magic, sexuality, drugs, and anarchy.
“Returning from his failed expedition to find the source of the Nile, explorer, linguist, scholar, and swordsman Sir Richard Francis Burton finds himself sucked into the perilous depths of this moral and ethical vacuum when the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, employs him as ‘King’s Spy’. His first mission: to investigate the sexual assaults committed by a weird apparition known as Spring Heeled Jack; to find out why chimney sweeps are being kidnapped by half-man, half-dog creatures; and to discover the whereabouts of his badly injured ex-friend (and new enemy), John Hanning Speke.
“Accompanied by the diminutive and pain-loving poet, Algernon Swinburne, Burton’s investigations lead him back to one of the defining events of the age: the brutal assassination of Queen Victoria in 1840; and the terrifying possibility that the world he inhabits shouldn’t exist at all!”
Hodder is a British writer, editor, and web producer, who recently relocated to Valencia in Spain to de-stress, teach the English language, and write novels.