I know that I’m supposed to be boycotting Tor books or something, but I’m not going to stop supporting a publisher when the publishing industry as a whole is already in dire straits. Besides, Tor occasionally puts out a really fun, engaging piece of genre that i can’t put down.
Like The Court of the Air.
Stephen Hunt manages to take the ‘destined to save the world’ plot and place it in a Charles Dickens world tinged with magic, airships and the oddly religious mechanized Steammen. The result is rare, even for a fantasy novel – a world that feels wondrous while still feeling grounded in the familiar, in this case Victorian London (most specifically the MIddlesteel district in the Kingdom of Jackals).
One of the other things I liked about the novel is that it’s billed as steampunk and actually has a bit of subversiveness in it and not just ‘zowie, airships’. This is a book motivated by politics – monarchy, communism and representative democracy – and no one of the systems is blameless or conversely wholly wicked.
The world that Hunt builds is so fanciful as to almost be silly at times (there are natural disasters called floatquakes that occur at the convergence of ley lines and cause sections of the landscape to become violently, permanently airborne along with everything and everyone on them), but I buy it wholecloth, without even the aid of huge expanses of exposition; there’s not even a map and I still dig the setting. It’s a setting that will be revisited, too, as The Kingdom Beyond The Waves and The Rise of the Iron Moon are hitting shelves in 2009 if Amazon is to be trusted.
I don’t have a fancy ratings rubric like my friends over at The Book Smugglers, but I’m going to say that this was pretty good. Not mind-blowing, but really solid. It’s a good thing, too; I can only make room for so many Scott Lynches and Patrick Rothfusses before I become that guy that gets overly enthusiastic about everything.
RATING: Pretty Good
