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Jackelian Chronicles – Book V
Stephen Hunt
Harper Voyager (HarperCollins)
7 August 2011 / ISBN 0007289707
Fantasy/Steampunk
Amazon
US
|| UK
Reviewed
by Rachel A Hyde
If there has been something missing in your reading since you
closed the covers on Secrets
of the Fire Sea (also reviewed on this site) then it will
be missing no longer. Those swashbuckling Jackelians are back for
another rip snorting helping of steampunk at its best. This time
the focus is on the Royal Aerostatical Navy, comprised not of sea
ship but airships. It is into this service that young Jack Keats
is pressed straight from the courtroom where he is about to be sentenced
to hang. The airship to which he is assigned is rather strange,
the captain mad and several other officers rather mysterious to
say the least. Unfortunately for Jack he has joined the RAN just
as they are about to go to war with the Cassarabians…
I love steampunk; just can’t seem to get enough of it. It
seems that everybody knows what it consists of but there is actually
very little of it published which makes a book like this all the
more of a treat. For this is the very quintessence of steampunk,
being a SF tweak on the classic sea story genre and the modern equivalent
of a Victorian adventure story. Hunt’s world is as ever very
well realized, with the mechanics behind the airships well thought
out in particular. All his world building has a solid formation
that makes me imagine notebooks crammed with data about everything
he has invented for his series. This is also a novel with a topical
appeal during the present war in the Middle East, and a thoughtful
theme of the lengths people are driven to when all their options
lead to cruelty of one form or another. Hunt paints a chilling picture
of a nation for whom this cruelty is an everyday thing, and so entrenched
in their lives that decency is down to the individual alone. It
all makes for a heady adventure story but also the sort of book
that lingers in the mind afterwards with a moral of its own. There
are even heroes to cheer for at a time when most fantasy novels
have antiheroes, making the book a delightful mix of the traditional
and the modern, the exciting and the thought-provoking. Probably
the best novel I will read this year unless I am very lucky.
The
Kingdom Beyond the Waves, Book II
Secrets
of the Fire Sea, Book IV
Jack
Cloudie, Book V
From
The Deep of the Dark, Book VI |
