Stephen Hunt (1) (1966–)

I was thinking about giving this book 4 stars but really I said, "Man this book is awesome" way too many times to not give it 5 stars. It's really about action and ideas and a fully realized world. The action is almost constant and it's fun. The characters are badasses (not right away but at some point). People also die so it doesn't feel like a Disney fantasy where everything works out perfect. It's brutal and gritty and political.

All I have to say is voodoo practicing steam men and insane show more insect gods feeding off the still warm hearts of 1000's of humans, airships dropping dirtgas on protesting socialists and a king with no arms. I think you get.

I actually read the 2nd book in this series first The Kingdom Beyond the Waves but it didn't make much of a difference. It's not the same characters just the same world. I actually like this one more. show less

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 show more 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. show less

I don't know if I'm disappointed or not by this book. Basically it's a steampunk fantasy set in a world that is recognisably a quasi-Victorian England in conflict with a neighbour which is recognisably a cross between Revolutionary France and Marxist USSR. Throw in some quasi-Aztec evil gods, voodoo steammen and fae magick and you get - well, a hell of a mess really. Some people applaud the wealth of ideas crammed into this novel, but for me there were just too many of them, too scantily show more developed, and in the end they threaten to bury the story entirely. Add to that a relentlessly fast pace and I ended up feeling like I'd fallen into a raging torrent and was just being carried along blindly by it.

The characters were poorly developed and one never really got to care for them or what happened to them. Although Hunt does occasionally lapse into passages of fluid and poetic prose, the dialogue is often cringeworthy. Yes, It's supposed to sound quaint and archaic, I suppose, but it just sounded creaky and artificial to me.

I wanted to like this book and had high expectations since it came so highly praised to me. And I did appreciate some of the imaginative concepts and rip-roaring action scenes. But ultimately it's over-ambitious. rambling and over-long, the result of a first-time author's tendency to cram in everything including the kitchen sink going unchecked by a firm editorial hand. I might try another of his books later on, just to see if he's learned to rein in the ideas enough to let a story shine through. show less

Like being pelted by spare brass cogs in triple-waltz time. Familiar Steampunk tropes abound, the characterization never takes hold, and there's just too damn much going on. Underground lands? Check. Orphans? Check. Sentient robots? Check. Quasi-Victorian social structure? Check. Imaginative gun-weapons? Check.

Oh, look, here comes the airship. I thought one would be along sooner or later.

I also thought the political undercurrents were crudely managed. Those bad, bad commies! I finished the show more book, but won't be continuing with the series. show less