The Court of the Air

Stupid. Had to give it two stars because I kept reading to the end. If the writing had been truly unbearable I wouldn't have read it all--but I admit, about 150 pages from the end I just started skimming. There was no character development!!! There was also no plot, no climax, no resolution, no satisfaction. What the author did offer was plenty of action, pain, creatures, torture, pain, battles, blood, caricatures, pain, maimings, flowery language, pain, and then some more unnecessary pain. Oh, throw in some more torture. That should do it. Stupid. ( )

This book has its flaws. It's a crazy mass of characters and governments and shadow governments and shadow gods - there are so many forces at work throughout these 600 pages that I wished I had an eBook reader with a search function so I could go back and remind myself how it all fit together. But it was a hell of a ride, and I found myself reluctant to finish it because I wasn't quite ready to be done with it.

Unlike with other sprawling, epic stories, I didn't find myself emotionally attached to any of the characters (I didn't find myself even blinking at any of the deaths), but I did find them pretty interesting. The steammen are a great take on robots, and I enjoyed following both Molly and Oliver on their journeys, even if their eventual evolutions seemed sort of shaky. ( )

I've been meaning to pick up The Court of the Air for a long time. Can't remember how Stephen Hunt got on my radar, but he's been sort of hanging around there for a while, so I grabbed this from the library on one of my recent trips there. I'm not entirely sure I want to read the sequel: The Court of the Air has some astonishing ideas, and some really great bits, and even some characters I found interesting, but it got tangled up in itself. The writing is competent enough but the planning leaves something to be desired: it's like looking at the wrong side of a bit of cross-stitching -- you can see what it's meant to look like, but it's a bit of a mess.

There is a lot to enjoy about it, but it's bogged down by that confusion. On the one hand, it's the start of a series which could well improve a lot; on the other, I took a break from reading it for a couple of days and struggled to get my feet when I came back to it. That's going to get worse with an ongoing series that's still getting new books.

Still, I have the second book out of the library too, so I might as well at least try it. Stephen Hunt's work doesn't fill me with the same excitement as Philip Palmer's work does, so it doesn't really help his case that I discovered Philip Palmer at the same time. ( )

Thinly-veiled anti-socialist diatribes aside, the thing that really tweaked me was the evident fascination with horrible things.

How can I show how really horrible these (socialist) people are? By making everybody "equalized" a la Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" but in a much creepier way, by turning them into machines, or having them cut off body parts.

How can I show how awful the ancient society was? They weren't just doing human sacrifice -- they were making an enormous killing machine out of the blood of their beloved family members, AND turning other people into meat plants so they could be cannibal farmers.

How can I demonstrate the awfulness of people with anti-monarchical sentiments? By embedding ritual humiliation, amputation, and torture into their treatment of the royal family.

It was honestly just sort of disturbing, how the author's inventive capacity were most turned toward inventing horrors.

On top of all that, the shallow political analysis (see S. M. Stirling, for example) is hardly even noticeable. The heroic rich adventurers, the monarchs and royalists who aren't as bad as the socialists, the idealist who although not evil is still completely delusional, and so forth. That all just kind of faded into the background of being repeatedly hit over the head with really horrible gross abuses of the imagination.

But I did notice how the attempts to make the book trendily gender balanced failed rather miserably. The boy and girl protagonists were figured as the "defense" and the "offense" by some "watcher" species. But the girl's "offensive" capabilities turned out to be being really good at withstanding torture, and then merging with some mechanical god to supernaturally show up at the last minute and do not much. The "defensive" boy turned out to merge with some kind of warrior spirit who sent him wicking around swords and having a sort of grim bloodthirstiness. Channeling Elric of Melniboné, I guess, because there was a kind of soul-sucking quality to the weapons. Anyway I guess that failed because there wasn't a lot of character development. We were supposed to want to like the characters, but they mostly just were cyphers for the plot as well as for the operators in their own world. So the author ended up falling back on gender stereotypes.

Anyway, I won't be picking up more of these. If you like a lot of horror mixed in with your steampunk, dystopia, adventuring, and capital-L Libertarian-style politics, give these a shot. ( )

Oh, this book. Much like Jonathan Strange, Court of the Air is one that I love to bits but I haven’t read it time after time. It’s one of the first steampunk books that I got into, and it’s definitely a good one.

The world-building’s fantastic. I like that there’s no implication that this is supposed to be our Earth x-number of years or even that it’s an alternate universe, but rather, it’s own Earth with specific races and cultures. There are equivalents with the different countries that you can draw on the references, but even still, Hunt makes this world his own. What’s also important to note is the sheer political detail that gets covered in this, which I think definitely adds to the world-building. While a large amount of the book is action and mystery, there’s a healthy amount of political intrigue that adds to the story. Again, there’s many real world parallels, but for the story’s sake, it does illustrate the larger ideologies at play here (and in future volumes). I also like the fact that none of the politics are painted as “This is the absolute one thing we (and by extension, you, the reader) should follow in governance.” Even the main political infrastructure of Jackals has its darker side. It’s sort of interesting to find a book that deals with the warts and all of political ideology. Also, the population of this Earth fascinates me. It’s not just humans and sorcerers and fae, although they all play a major role in the series. We’ve got a race of crustacean people living in steampunk quasi-London. There’s doglike people who pop up (although they have a bigger role in the second book). My personal favorite, and the one I sell the series on, are the Steammen: sentinent steampunk robots who practice voudoun. There were no words for me to describe that awesome aside from “squee!”

And while this all comes off as rather gimmicky, Hunt manages to pull off a finely crafted story that supports and fits this world he’s created. There’s so much complexity in this that I’m not surprised that there’s more to the series than just the one book. And I love the history that we get in here, and that there’s so much more to explore to it.

That all said, there is a LOT going on in this. It’s already bad enough following two narratives that could both support a single book, add in the sheer amount of world-building and backstory and it does feel like you need a list of names to figure out what’s going on. And a lot of the characters don’t appear for more than a few pages to boot. That said though, I think it’s one of the positive aspects of the book, and adds to the world. As for our two main characters, I rather like Molly and Oliver. They start off as kind of boring protagonists—both stuck in boring lives, have super-special abilities, get dragged into adventure, atypical orphans saving the world plot. What I like about them is that they’re very much their own characters. Oliver’s known that he’s got the potential for his special abilities, they’ve just never come to light, and he’s much more focused on trying to stop his powers from manifesting. I also love that there’s this fantastic set-up of him becoming a swashbuckling hero in-universe. (More hood o’the marsh in the next books!) Molly is fantastic—I love that because she reads so many penny dreadfuls, when she learns that someone’s trying to kill, Molly immediately launches into a scenario from one of her books. (And the villain pretty much goes “lol no.”) And while her own special abilities aren’t really alluded to in the beginning, I like that she slowly learns about them and uses them to her advantage. I really want to see more of her as the series goes on. And both Molly and Oliver don’t sit around and let things just happen to them. Oliver definitely isn’t afraid to ask questions that need to be asked, and Molly does her best with trying to piece her past together. They’re presented as these stock characters, but they definitely become more than just stereotypes. Not to mention, while their individual plotlines feel like two random events, everything dovetails neatly together.

I also love the supporting cast. Not so much Oliver’s quasi-guardian, Harry Stave, if only because his motives feel a little too unclear. Molly’s friends and allies, though, are fantastic. I love the steammen who come to help her out; her friends at the workhouse; Professor Amelia Harsh, who unfortunately disappears after two pages (but is the main character in the sequel!)—again, I loved that we get these fleshed-out characters, even if they don’t play a huge part in the narrative. And Prince Alpheus—you can’t help but feel sorry for the poor kid, especially when it’s mentioned early on that members of the royal family are mutilated and subject to public humiliation for past sins. (And this is for the country we’re supposed to like.) My heartstings, all of them. I like that while the main villains are fairly black and white in their motives, the way they’re presented until the reveal is definitely muddled and present different options.

This is a fantastic read, and definitely for someone looking for good steampunk novels. I don’t know if I’d necessarily recommend it for those starting out in the genre, but it does bring many new ideas to the subject, along with some fantastic world-building and just incredibly enjoyable storytelling. Despite the overreaching story arcs and build-up, at the heart of Hunt’s world is a grand adventure tale, which has been continuing throughout the series thus far. It’s an excellent read, and comes highly recommended.
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