Mark Hodder - Free Library Land Online - Cultural

The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats

Tue, 27 Oct 2015 14:00:24 +0200

Sir Richard Francis Burton’s expedition has returned from the future, bringing with it knowledge of technologies that must remain secret if history is to proceed as it should. However, when one of his colleagues turns rogue, the secret falls into the hands of the very people most likely to misuse it. Betrayed, Burton and Swinburne watch in horror as the Empire’s elite employ the technology to secure their positions of privilege. When London's parks are transformed into concentration camps, artists and philosophers are declared enemies of the State, and propaganda proliferates, the king’s agent finds himself on the wrong side of—the king! Can Burton and his band of hunted revolutionaries overthrow an apparently indestructible and immortal autocrat ... and if so, at what personal cost? The Spring Heeled Jack saga reaches its explosive conclusion!

The Return of the Discontinued Man

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 14:00:24 +0200

SPRING HEELED JACK IS JUMPING BACK! It's 9 p.m. on February 15, 1860, and Charles Babbage, the British Empire's most brilliant scientist, performs an experiment. Within moments, blood red snow falls from the sky and Spring Heeled Jack pops out of thin air in London's Leicester Square. Though utterly disoriented and apparently insane, the strange creature is intent on one thing: hunting Sir Richard Francis Burton! Spring Heeled Jack isn't alone in his mental confusion. Burton can hardly function; he's experiencing one hallucination after another-visions of parallel realities and future history. Someone, or something, is trying to tell him about…what? When the revelation comes, it sends Burton and his companions on an expedition even the great explorer could never have imagined-a voyage through time itself into a twisted future where steam technology has made a resurgence and a despotic intelligence rules over the British Empire!

The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi

Sun, 27 Oct 2013 14:00:25 +0200

Burton & Swinburne return in a new series! The Beast is coming. History will be remade. Since the assassination of Queen Victoria in 1840, a cabal of prominent men-including King George V, HRH Prince Albert, Benjamin Disraeli, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel-has received guidance from the Afterlife. The spirit of a dead mystic, Abdu El Yezdi, has helped them to steer the empire into a period of unprecedented peace and creativity. But on the eve of a groundbreaking alliance with the newly formed Greater German Confederation, scientists, surgeons, and engineers are being abducted-including Brunel! The government, in search of answers, turns to the Afterlife, only to find that Abdu El Yezdi is now refusing to speak with the living. Enter the newly-knighted Sir Richard Francis Burton, fresh from his discovery of the source of the Nile. Appointed the king's agent, he must trace the missing luminaries and solve the mystery of Abdu El Yezdi's silence. But the Beast has been summoned. How can the famous explorer fulfill his mission when his friends and loved ones are being picked off, one by one, by what appears to be a supernatural entity-by, perhaps, Abdu El Yezdi himself?

The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 14:00:24 +0300

It is 1862, though not the 1862 it should be. . . . Time has been altered, and Sir Richard Francis Burton, the king’s agent, is one of the few people who know that the world is now careening along a very different course from that which Destiny intended. When a clockwork-powered man of brass is found abandoned in Trafalgar Square, Burton and his assistant, the wayward poet Algernon Swinburne, find themselves on the trail of the stolen Garnier Collection—black diamonds rumored to be fragments of the Lemurian Eye of Naga, a meteorite that fell to Earth in prehistoric times. His investigation leads to involvement with the media sensation of the age: the Tichborne Claimant, a man who insists that he’s the long lost heir to the cursed Tichborne estate. Monstrous, bloated, and monosyllabic, he’s not the aristocratic Sir Roger Tichborne known to everyone, yet the working classes come out in force to support him. They are soon rioting through the streets of London, as mysterious steam wraiths incite all-out class warfare. From a haunted mansion to the Bedlam madhouse, from South America to Australia, from séances to a secret labyrinth, Burton struggles with shadowy opponents and his own inner demons, meeting along the way the philosopher Herbert Spencer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Florence Nightingale, and Charles Doyle (father of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). Can the king’s agent expose a plot that threatens to rip the British Empire apart, leading to an international conflict the like of which the world has never seen? And what part does the clockwork man have to play? Burton and Swinburne’s second adventure—The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man—is filled with eccentric steam-driven technology, grotesque characters, and a deepening mystery that pushes forward the three-volume story arc begun in The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack.

Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 14:00:24 +0300

It is 1863, but not the one it should be. Time has veered wildly off course, and now the first moves are being made that will lead to a devastating world war and the fall of the British Empire. 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 the mist-shrouded Mountains of the Moon, in war- torn Africa of 1914, and in Green Park, London, where, in the year 1840, Burton must face the man responsible for altering time: Spring Heeled Jack! Burton and Swinburne's third adventure is filled with eccentric steam-driven technology, grotesque characters, and bizarre events, completing the three-volume story arc begun in The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack and The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man.

Macallister Fogg 2: Great Great Great (And So Forth) Uncle Dragoslav

Tue, 27 Aug 2013 10:25:43 +0300

Sexton Blake and the Great War

Thu, 09 Jul 2020 14:15:20 +0300

BRITAIN AND GERMANY ARE AT WAR AND SEXTON BLAKE IS IN THE THICK OF IT

As the battle for the Western Front rages, adventuring detective Sexton Blake pits his intellect and physical prowess against the machinations of the Kaiser. A band of intrepid allies join Blake to take on the forces of evil in three classic stories, collected here for the first time.

From uncovering secret German naval bases to dangling from Zeppelins, fighting atop moving trains and escaping firing squads, Blake moves through war-torn Europe solving mysteries and fighting against tyranny.

Join him as he enters a war of secrets, soldiers and spies...

A Red Sun Also Rises

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 14:00:24 +0300

A tale of good and evil, where neither is what it seems! Aiden Fleischer, a bookish priest, finds himself transported to an alien world. With him is Miss Clarissa Stark, a crippled hunchback of exceptional ability, wronged by an aristocrat and cast out from society. On the planet Ptallaya, under two bright yellow suns, they encounter the Yatsill, a race of enthusiastic mimics who shape their society after impressions picked up from Clarissa's mind. Creating a faux London, the alien creatures enroll Clarissa in their Council of Magicians and Aiden in the City Guard. But why does the peaceful city require guards? After a day that, in earthly terms, has lasted for months, the answer comes, for on this planet without night, a red sun also rises, and brings with it a destructive evil. The Blood Gods! Hideous creatures, they cause Aiden to confront his own internal darkness while trying to protect his friend and his new home. With a sharp eye for period detail and a rich imagination, Mark Hodder establishes a weirdly twisted version of Victorian London on a convincingly realized alien world, and employs them to tackle a profound psychological and moral question. A Red Sun Also Rises breaks new ground by combining the sword & planet genre with Victorian steampunk while adding an edgy psychological twist.

Macallister Fogg 3: The Hetrodythermaline Highwayman

Tue, 27 Aug 2013 10:25:42 +0300

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 14:00:24 +0300

London, 1861. Sir Richard Francis Burton—explorer, linguist, scholar, and swordsman; his reputation tarnished; his career in tatters; his former partner missing and probably dead. Algernon Charles Swinburne—unsuccessful poet and follower of de Sade; for whom pain is pleasure, and brandy is ruin! They stand at a crossroads in their lives and are caught in the epicenter of an empire torn by conflicting forces: Engineers transform the landscape with bigger, faster, noisier, and dirtier technological wonders; Eugenicists develop specialist animals to provide unpaid labor; Libertines oppose repressive laws and demand a society based on beauty and creativity; while the Rakes push the boundaries of human behavior to the limits with magic, drugs, and anarchy. The two men are sucked into the perilous depths of this moral and ethical vacuum when Lord Palmerston commissions Burton to investigate assaults on young women committed by a weird apparition known as Spring Heeled Jack, and to find out why werewolves are terrorizing London's East End. Their investigations lead them to one of the defining events of the age, and the terrifying possibility that the world they inhabit shouldn't exist at all!

Macallister Fogg 1: The Master Mummer's Mummy (The Adventures of Macallister Fogg)

Tue, 27 Aug 2013 10:25:41 +0300

Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon bas-3

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:14:34 +0200

The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure)

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 12:00:33 +0200

Red Sun Also Rises, A

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 06:56:55 +0200