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Reviews
Stephen Hunt's The Court of the Air.
 The
Bookseller: Bookseller's Choice for April 2007
Extract begins.
‘A crossover title in the vein of Philip
Pullman … more straightforward and much
easier to read than Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
… a genuinely engaging read, which has believable
characters in a fantastic setting. The Dickensian
references are a big selling point… It’s
an intriguing and original idea which the author
has managed to pull off rather well.’
Extract ends.
For the full review, read The
Bookseller.
There's a lot more
reviews of The Court of the Air over at our 'press'
page... click here to view them.
Stephen Hunt's For The Crown &
The Dragon.
Protostellar Fantasy Novel of the Year:
2004
 An
inset map recalls those conjectured scenarios
used as scare stories for global warming (the
eco-disaster which, the informed reader might
recollect, proceeded the more immediate crisis
of recession, collapsing world economies, and
AIDS). For in this tale Hunt's alternative world
topography resembles our own, but has extra bits
of ocean similar to that caused by a rising sea-level.
France and Spain are separated by the Tolisi straits,
the great English north-south divide has materialised
as the watery gulf of Emrys, and Italy is reduced
to a cluster of half-familiar shapes.
But there's something more serious than rampant
aerosols and CFCs at work here.
Hunt's Roman Empire failed to succumb to the
heretical sect of Christianity, and his world
was thereby saved from the horrors of the inquisition,
the Jewish pogroms, the colonial genocide and
religious wars that resulted from Emperor Constantine's
folly. Instead, his Rome embraced a kind of Pagan
Demonology which involved demisapi slaves - beastmen
- and all manner of quasi-nastiness that resulted
in the shattering of the world. There are potential
elements of Keith Roberts, Moorcock - and even
the classical myth-magic of the wonderful Thomas
Burnett Swann in such imaginings.
But the genre Hunt is conjuring is flintlock
fantasy. And to achieve this he fast-forwards
his history to the resulting unremittingly dour
18th century Europe, where squalid brutality and
petty warfare are the common currency of death,
and human lands are hemmed in by an enchanted
wilderness of faerie witchwoods - haunted by interminglings
of sly feral things: "A wilderness which
wrote her own rules."
Taliesin is the story's protagonist; a one-eyed
opportunistic soldier with attitude, in yet another
vicious little insurrectionary war in Queen Annan
Pendrag's Cold Sea Islands (ie Britain). By witnessing
supernatural events at the final storming of Drum
Draiocht, Taliesin and his companions, the giant
highlander Connaire Mor, and a hell-rake dandy
called Gunnar are precipitated into a rollicking
series of picaresque adventures in the Dumas mould,
but with a higher body-count. They journey on
a mission to the other side of the world, next
to the very Frost itself, where "the overland
pass is a nightmare, and the Enclosed Sea is full
of privateers preying on every ship attempting
to sail across it."
There's much intrigue and treachery, demons and
darkness, assassins and weirdsman, corsairs and
courtiers, in a well-portrayed world where women
are dollymops, men use holster-puffers, and duellists
say things like "damn your eyes, sir."
In pursuit of this vision of a twisted alternative
English Regency, his soldiers - with Finbar the
renegade priest, Laetha the hunchback, and other
oddities in tow - get themselves dispatched to
seek Princess Ariane, who has eloped to Sombor,
a Balkan invention of the former Yugoslavia: "My
merchanteers say this part of the world is a madness
now. Reports from this direction are vague, but
alliances seem to be shifting with each telling,
territory changing hands with equal rapidity."
So no change there! But the further from home
our heroes adventure, the more bizarre the cultures
they encounter; the Dagda tree-folk, the Germanic
Thuringian Empire of the Tree with its steam-based
technology, and Sombor itself, where massive haplocanth
lizards haul wheeled cities through man-high pampas
grass. And through a catalogue of gut-spilling
limb-lopping battles they finally penetrate beyond
the wall at the end of the world, to a William
Hope Hodgesonesque ultimate ziggurat, and into
Hunt's finest prose to discover the cosmic secrets
of the Sunken Empire which wrecked the world with
its black necromancy and demon plots (its apocalyptical
demise directly connected to a clash of direction
in the heavens).
For the Crown & The Dragon is a first novel
with a closely detailed - if skewed 18th century,
spiked with intriguing elements of myth. Hunt
has ignited a continuum of wonder. "Ah,"
breathes one of his characters, "the mixture
of superstition and worldliness, it all adds to
the fascination of our age, doesn't it?"
It do.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER. Andrew Darlington is a book
reviewer for Protostellar, Orion SF, New Moon,
Far Point, and many NSFA publications. Better
known in the wider world as a freelance music
journalist, as well as the writing half of the
Ron Turner partnership which revived the 1956
Jet Ace Logan cartoon strip.
This review first appeared in Protostellar
Magazine, and in a modified form (we believe)
in one of the NSFA journals.
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