Stephen Hunt (1) (1966–)

Definitely my favorite Jackelian novel so far. I still can't quite work out why I don't enjoy these more. All the elements are there: high adventure, get characters fantastic settings, great world building but somehow they still seem to be less than the sum of their parts.
Perhaps there are just too many ideas here. Several alien races, two lead characters almost on separate adventures, time travel, ancient warriors brought back to life, sentient spacecraft, giant ants all set against the complex political machinations of Jackals. Is it all too much to allow a cohesive, engaging plot to carry through? Still - If you've got it flaunt it - and Hunt certainly has it. There are concepts ideas and scenes here that a lesser author would spin into a novel or even a trilogy. I sometimes find myself breathlessly wishing to return to a scene or character to explore more but Stephen Hunt is already on to the next plot twist or bizarre monster encounter.

Often he will leave a scene just as things are hotting up and then when you rejoin this characters you are already in the after math of what happened. This could be frustrating and certainly makes you have to read back a few pages to remind yourself where you left those characters, but it means the plot certainly rattles along and there are no shortage of classic cliff hanger moments.

The ideas are wildly ambitious, expertly executed but the absurdity and derring do of the classic Victorian penny dreadful make this a truly joyful read.

Keep em coming please Mr Hunt!… (lisätietoja)

Having picked this up as a kind of, "Ahh, what the heck, $2.00 is worth it," buy in a used bookshop, with some reservations having read the first in the series a couple of years back, I found I liked this book quite a bit. I'd forgotten some of the details of the world, but that is fine. It almost makes me want to revisit the first book since my main complaint there was that it was too long, too convoluted, too everything-and-the-kitchen-sink... maybe I'd be more into it now than I was then.

4 stars, though really I think the (current) average of ~3.75 is closer to it. I'd probably rate this a 3.5 if I could, and 3 seems like underrating more than 4 is overrating.… (lisätietoja)

I liked much of this book, but there were definitely a few detractions.

1.) Steam-punk to the face: magic, machines, outlaws, "Carlist" Marxists, faiery/"fey" powers, other dimensions, Chtuluian old gods, orphans **huge inhale**, pirates, mutants, and ice age, underground cities... It does all sort of hang together, but it is like a fire-hose of tropes to the face.

2.) Characters do seem thin. Partially this is because of #1: one of the main characters is an orphan girl... who seems a lot like a generic, spunky orphan heroine. And partially this is because there isn't a lot of time left, even in nearly 600 pages, to flesh out all 20-ish main and important supporting characters.

On the plus side, the world was interesting, perhaps too much so, even: parallel worlds/higher levels/etc.; deep history; outlines of a much larger and politically stable, if not necessarily peaceful, world; and plenty of loose ends to lead to further books (a number of which I see have already been written.)

And, in disagreement with what some have written here, I though the book moved along quite quickly.… (lisätietoja)

This book kept getting weirder and weirder, and that's a good thing. An odd mash-up of steampunk and magic. Lots of shout outs to Dickens. Like this review, it strikes off into many directions, most of them are not tied up by the end of the novel. For a good part of the book, I kept wondering when a couple characters were going to reappear; one of them did in the last chapters. The last chapter was maddening since it gave a few glimpses of what happens to some of the characters but then it ended.… (lisätietoja)