![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Sep. 12th, 2008 11:28 pmCurrently reading The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt; I'm liking it and being annoyed by it in equal measure.
It centres around the Kingdom of Jackals - which the author seems to have borrowed from Terry Pratchet's current, steampunky iteration of Ankh-Morpock. The humans seem quite hobbit-like in character. They like to quietly tend their allotments, drink beer and smoke their pipes - though they are boisterously fond of a good public hanging and have the charming tradition of pelting the condemned prisoner with rotten fruit.
They share a continent with an insanely-genocidal, hyper-Stalinist, communist regime and an equally genocidal theocracy. Luckily, despite the nation-of-shopkeepers thing, and doing petty-bourgeois in bucket-loads, Jackals is not to be messed with - they have a monopoly on lighter-than-air gas and so have a large airship fleet that's had a fair amount of practice at obliterating other nation's cities with explosives and poison gas. Jackals also has a centuries-old alliance with the Steam-men - a nation of sentient steam powered robots who tend to have a quiet, philosophical manner. But who include amongst their number plenty of mecha-style walking tanks.
Too good to be true - you just know Jackals is heading for a fall.
Unfortunately, the plot-line is that old chestnut of a boy and girl who've had ghastly upbringings but who don't know their true birthright or their full powers and are due to save the world. Also, as a reviewer mentioned, the author is addicted to global search and replace. So the gas-miners don't have a union, they have a 'combination'. The Jackals historical civil war which replaced an absolutist monarchy with a constitutional one was won by parliament's "New Pattern Army". The Stalinists next door don't call themselves a commonwealth, they're a 'commonshare'. "Card sharps" are the programmers who deal with Jackals' giant mechanical computer systems, which seem to have been lifted straight from "The Difference Engine". Plentiful neologisms, whose meaning you have to figure out from context, are a crude way of rubbing your nose in the fact this is a strange different world and become annoying and tedious very fast. Also, the author spends about two pages describing how guns work in this world but doesn't bother describing the two non-human races that make reasonably frequent appearances - after a while, you figure-out from context that one-lot are like human-sized crabs and the others are giant rodents (possibly, I'm still not sure).
Generally however, the author is effervescing with wonderful ideas that make the world he's made quite a delight - like a parliamentary chamber traditionally staffed with club-toting heavies, ready to beat the stuffing out of MP's (sorry, Guardians) on the frequent occasions when debate turns into a full-blown riot.
As I said, a wonderful world. I just wish he could have thought of something more original to have happened in it.
It centres around the Kingdom of Jackals - which the author seems to have borrowed from Terry Pratchet's current, steampunky iteration of Ankh-Morpock. The humans seem quite hobbit-like in character. They like to quietly tend their allotments, drink beer and smoke their pipes - though they are boisterously fond of a good public hanging and have the charming tradition of pelting the condemned prisoner with rotten fruit.
They share a continent with an insanely-genocidal, hyper-Stalinist, communist regime and an equally genocidal theocracy. Luckily, despite the nation-of-shopkeepers thing, and doing petty-bourgeois in bucket-loads, Jackals is not to be messed with - they have a monopoly on lighter-than-air gas and so have a large airship fleet that's had a fair amount of practice at obliterating other nation's cities with explosives and poison gas. Jackals also has a centuries-old alliance with the Steam-men - a nation of sentient steam powered robots who tend to have a quiet, philosophical manner. But who include amongst their number plenty of mecha-style walking tanks.
Too good to be true - you just know Jackals is heading for a fall.
Unfortunately, the plot-line is that old chestnut of a boy and girl who've had ghastly upbringings but who don't know their true birthright or their full powers and are due to save the world. Also, as a reviewer mentioned, the author is addicted to global search and replace. So the gas-miners don't have a union, they have a 'combination'. The Jackals historical civil war which replaced an absolutist monarchy with a constitutional one was won by parliament's "New Pattern Army". The Stalinists next door don't call themselves a commonwealth, they're a 'commonshare'. "Card sharps" are the programmers who deal with Jackals' giant mechanical computer systems, which seem to have been lifted straight from "The Difference Engine". Plentiful neologisms, whose meaning you have to figure out from context, are a crude way of rubbing your nose in the fact this is a strange different world and become annoying and tedious very fast. Also, the author spends about two pages describing how guns work in this world but doesn't bother describing the two non-human races that make reasonably frequent appearances - after a while, you figure-out from context that one-lot are like human-sized crabs and the others are giant rodents (possibly, I'm still not sure).
Generally however, the author is effervescing with wonderful ideas that make the world he's made quite a delight - like a parliamentary chamber traditionally staffed with club-toting heavies, ready to beat the stuffing out of MP's (sorry, Guardians) on the frequent occasions when debate turns into a full-blown riot.
As I said, a wonderful world. I just wish he could have thought of something more original to have happened in it.
