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The Kingdom Beyond the Waves
Jackelian Chronicles, Book II

by Stephen Hunt

     

The Kingdom Beyond the Waves is the second book in Stephen Hunt's steampunk series that began with The Court of the Air. That actually sounds a lot more informative than it really is.

It's really more of another book in a shared world, with a few common characters and events mentioned here that happened there. You don't have to read the one to enjoy the other, and in fact in some ways they're different enough that enjoying / not enjoying one doesn't necessarily guarantee you'll feel the same about the other. Steampunk is the main thing they have in common—an alternate Victorian world where steam power has been taken through science and magic far beyond what happened in the real 19th century. Here that includes flying machines and a world populated with steammen (who have their own royalty and gods) alongside the softbodies.

How you feel about steampunk will probably play a large part in how well you like these books. I'm on the fence—fascinated by the idea but not always a fan of the execution, since I don't find the Victorian aspect as enticing as the alternate technology. That being said, these are big, thick doorstop books and I couldn't put them down despite myself. The plots are constantly churning, changing, turning cartwheels, tap dancing along the edge, setting up cliffhangers then dropping a new line off a different cliff and just generally never letting up. That can grate at times, and I was frustrated with too many people and things with only elliptical references or insufficient explanations before moving on to the next thing before dancing back to the viewpoint of someone three chapters before... but I was certainly never bored.

Professor Amelia Harsh is obsessed with finding the lost civilization of Camlantis, where people lived in perfection and harmony. Given how the rest of academia looks on her obsession, if she wants to continue her search, she's going to have to accept an offer from the man she blames for her father's bankruptcy and and suicide. Quest has special information to help her, but getting there means acquiring a crew filled with lunatics and criminals to enter possibly the deadliest place on the planet. While it's an open question what Quest's motives are in the matter. Meanwhile a figure called Furnace Breath Nick gets diverted from his usual vengeance based antics into an investigation that will send him headlong into Amelia's adventure from a different angle—to keep her from destroying the world.

There's simply too much to the plot to even begin to try to give you a more complete overview, so I'll just say that if any of the above intrigues you at all, grab a copy of this book or start with its predecessor and just dive in. As I said, I wasn't set up to automatically be a fan but I still simply couldn't put them down.

The Book

Tor Books
Aug 2009
Hardcover
0765320436
SF - Steampunk
More at Amazon.com
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The Reviewer

Kim Malo
Reviewed 2009
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