Court of the Air, by Stephen Hunt

It's plain that Stephen Hunt is a student of history. The perfect admixture of the French and Russian Revolutions found as the political backdrop to his steampunk fantasy tale Court of the Air testifies as to his familiarity with the historical causes of revolution.

I might even argue that his work shows a nodding acquaintance with two hoary political sociology volumes; those would be Barrington Moore, Jr's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy—or possibly his mightiest critic's response, Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions.

The greatest gift of speculative fiction is to allow us to pursue the absurd to its logical end with no social repercussions. In Hunt's case, it permits us to see what might happen if the beginning of the French Revolution had ended with the final atrocities of the Russian Revolution. Court of the Air is a Dickensian romp through a creative world full of steampunk standards like zeppelins and boiler-driven mechanoid constructs. Hunt's contribution to the genre is a witty historical twist on Western revolutionary history.

I suppose if I was going to start criticizing Hunt's work, I'd start with his occasional use of clicheed language pairs, like “plucky orphan” or “dashing pirate”. Regardless, there's a lot of merit to the coded use of language that Hunt employs. The creation of new linguistic patterns that so many fantastic authors employ demands a great deal from a reader. Sometimes it's nice to simply relax into a story without having to unpack a token-Tolkien homage. Instead, Hunt uses the kind of plain language that emphasizes his story without jerking a reader out of the moment and into an internal debate about the merits of Tengwar cursive as reinterpreted by Tad Williams, bless his heart.

Here's the major issue with this book. Hunt either needed to cut 200 pages from it—or he needed to “commit trilogy,” as Marion Zimmer Bradley once told Mercedes Lackey after reading her Arrows of the Queen. I understand the current backlash against neverending fantasy series, but Hunt has a great world, and I'd like to see less scene-setting and more character development if this is a one-shot---or I'd like to see more background on the political situation in the Kingdom of Jackals if he's going to expand the storyline.

Hunt's work is imaginative, and if the greatest complaint that I have is that his editor should have made him write MORE, then I suppose he's succeeded. The perfectionist in me doesn't much like what I see as inefficiency in storytelling, but Hunt's world is absorbing enough to make me overlook some of the technical flaws.

Verdict: I'll read the next one.