Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon is the third book in the Burton & Swinburne series. It started off great, then it started to get a bit tedious about midway through. In the end, it made me angry.

The story jumps between two main time periods, and at first the reader is likely to be confused about what's going on and how things in the earlier time period led to the things in the later time period. At first I really enjoyed the story. I also enjoyed the characters, who I’ve become increasingly attached to throughout the series. I also enjoyed trying to puzzle out what was going on with the later time period and trying to guess what would happen in the earlier one.

Then at some point, I’m not really sure why, I started to lose interest. I still enjoyed the character interactions and parts of the story, but the book became easier to put down. Maybe it was just a bit too much travel and a few too many similar events, but it started to feel a little tedious.

The last chapter or two of the story made me mad, and particularly the very end. First, we’re given an explanation for everything that I found difficult to buy into. Then I didn’t like some of the events that happened towards the end. At the very end, I thought the author went off the rails and messed up the relatively consistent logic he had going on.

I’m rating this at 3 stars, which feels a little too generous given my frustration at the end, but I did enjoy most of it and it had some great moments so I can’t bring myself to rate it lower. The end left me with doubts about the remaining three books in the series, though. I plan to give the fourth book a try and then decide from there if I want to keep going, but first I’m going to take a short break to participate in a group read of an unrelated book.

I’ll put a few more excessively long details about my complaints in the spoiler tags:
At the very end, we find out that it was actually Burton who accidentally shot Queen Victoria when he went back in time to try to stop the Edward Oxford of the future from messing up the timeline. This is what messed up the logic for me. Future Edward kills Past Edward after Queen Victoria is killed (I went back and double-checked), and it’s the death of his ancestor that leads to him revealing too much technological info about the future which creates the drastically changed past. That past is what leads to Burton deciding to go back and try to stop Future Edward from interfering, which leads to him accidentally killing Queen Victoria. If she hadn’t died, Future Edward probably wouldn’t have messed up the timeline, so now we have an illogical paradox.

We were also told that the Nāga had manipulated all the events, all the way back to causing Future Edward to become obsessed with changing what his ancestor had done, to lead to the equivalence they sought so they could be free. I found that difficult to buy into. That was an awful lot of manipulation that relied on an almost omniscient understanding of how small changes would affect everything. I’ve had similar problems with other books that have used a similar device, where you have some entity influencing a convoluted sequence of events to achieve a fairly straight-forward objective that surely could have been achieved more easily with other means.

Aside from my issues with some of the logic in the story, I also just wasn’t happy with how things ended. We end with Burton killing Queen Victoria and we have no idea what happens next, which is a really frustrating ending. Also, a lot of great characters were killed. (Or in the case of Swinburne, were transformed into talking plant life in a remote region of Africa.) At least the parakeets Pox and Malady apparently thrived! If this were the last book in the series, I would have been particularly unhappy about Swinburne’s fate. As it is, I’m wondering how this series has three more books. The series is “Burton and Swinburne”, after all. Even if we assume Burton gets back to his own time period, Swinburne hardly seems to be in any position to participate in ongoing stories. So I assume there will be more time manipulation of some sort, and I’m worried it may further muddle a story that no longer makes a lot of sense. ( )

While I greatly enjoyed the first two books of this series the question always at the back of my mind was whether I really wanted to read six books of this stuff. With the third installment the answer would seem to be no, as this is just not as much fun as the first two books and it seems to be morphing from a gonzo alternative-history romp into a time-war scenario, as Richard Francis Burton becomes Schrodinger's Man and has to try and put right the damage Spring-Heeled Jack has done to the structure of time. We'll see but I'm going to have a very short hook in regards to the fourth volume whenever I get around to checking it out. ( )

Probably the weakest of the series so far, but still awesome. ( )

Sir Richard Francis Burton and his comrade Algernon Charles Swinburne are on a mission for what remains of the British Empire in 1863. Eugenicists discovered ways to grow monstrous insects then turn them into fighting machines, and the Germans are using this technology to find the Mountains of the Moon, deep in the heart of Africa. Their goal: the last of the three eyes of Naga, said to grant is possessor power to manipulate world events. Burton and Swinburne must reach the Eye before the Germans. Burton, however, finds himself traveling two different paths in time to reach the Mountains of the Moon: one in which his team races against the Germans, and the other—years later—in which the Germans control most of Africa with their horrific Eugenicist experiments and are at war with the straggling British Empire.

"Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon" confused me at the beginning, with its juxtapositions of characters in time; I finally got that hang of it around 50-60 pages in, but the transitions back and forth were still a bit awkward. It took a few paragraphs for me to realize about which timeline I was reading. For me, that was a big drawback to the book. Even so, I liked the incredibly descriptive writing and the imaginative creatures: mixtures of plant and humans, as well as large insects morphed into everyday machinery and vehicles. I recommend this if you enjoy tales of sci-fi and adventure with a somewhat historical bent. ( )

The best of the three!!!
I really loved this one, because I thought the path was defined. The first volume was great, the surprise, the novelty of it; the second followed basically the same path, in my opinion; I was expecting the third to also be the same, but it jumped and veered and amazed and it brought novelty all over again.
Amazing! ( )