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Jackelian #5
Jack Cloudie: A Novel
Jack Cloudie is a tale of high adventure and derring-do set in the same Victorian-style steampunk world as Stephen Hunt's acclaimed The Court of the Air and The Secrets of the Fire Sea . Thanks to his father's gambling debts, young Jack Keats finds himself on the streets and trying to survive as a pickpocket. Following a daring bank robbery gone badly awry, Jack narrowly escapes the scaffold, only to be pressed into the Royal Aerostatical Navy. Assigned to the most useless airship in the fleet, serving under a captain who is most probably mad, Jack seems to be bound for almost certain death in the faraway deserts of Cassarabia. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the slave Omar ibn Barir finds his life turned upside down when his master's religious sect is banned. Unexpectedly freed, he joins the Caliph's military forces―just as war is brewing. Two very similar young men prepare to face each other across a field of battle. But is Omar the enemy, or is Jack's true nemesis the sickness at the heart of the Caliph's court?
416 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 2011
10 people are currently reading
666 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Hunt
39 books345 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Stephen Hunt is a British writer living in London. His first fantasy novel, For the Crown and the Dragon, was published in 1994, and introduced a young officer, Taliesin, fighting for the Queen of England in a Napoleonic period alternative reality where the wars of Europe were being fought with sorcery and steampunk weapons (airships, clockwork machine guns, and steam-driven trucks called kettle-blacks). The novel won the 1994 WH Smith Award, and the book reviewer Andrew Darlington used Hunt's novel to coin the phrase Flintlock Fantasy to describe the sub-genre of fantasy set in a Regency or Napoleonic-era period.
Stephen Hunt is a British writer living in London. His first fantasy novel, For the Crown and the Dragon, was published in 1994, and introduced a young officer, Taliesin, fighting for the Queen of England in a Napoleonic period alternative reality where the wars of Europe were being fought with sorcery and steampunk weapons (airships, clockwork machine guns, and steam-driven trucks called kettle-blacks). The novel won the 1994 WH Smith Award, and the book reviewer Andrew Darlington used Hunt's novel to coin the phrase Flintlock Fantasy to describe the sub-genre of fantasy set in a Regency or Napoleonic-era period.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
September 8, 2011
War brews between the Kingdom of Jackals and Cassarabia. A young thief named Jack Keats is pressed into service on an experimental airship, the Iron Patridge after a botched bank job. A Cassarabian slave named Omar learns of his true parentage, only to have it stolen from him. As Jack and Omar learn what it means to be men, will war be averted or will the two world powers engage in a conflict that will destroy them both?
Jack Cloudie fleshes out two aspects of Stephen Hunt's Jackalian saga that have been repeatedly mentioned but never really explored: the airship navy and the womb mages of Cassarabia. It tells the story of Jack Keats gaining acceptance among the crew of the Iron Patridge and Omar becoming a guardsman and learning to not be a lazy ass all the time. The threads are united by a vizier's attempts to wrest the rulership of Cassaraba away from the Eternal Caliph.
Stephen Hunt's steampunk series continues to move forward, although it seems to get more wobbly as it goes. This was not my favorite of his books. Aside from a returning character, most of the cast didn't really engage me. In fact, I found some of them bland and some of them irritating. There wasn't a whole lot going on, either, not compared to his other books. There wasn't a whole lot of excitement to be had, a pity since I've been waiting forever for him to do an airship novel. Both plot threads were fairly standard coming of age tales. I guess the whole thing just felt a little tired. Not surprising since this is the fifth book in the series.
So why did I give it a 3 after I just shat all over it? Well, three reasons.
1 - Commodore Black is the man! I missed Old Blackie. He's easily my favorite character in the entire series.
2 - The womb mages of Cassarabia had been talked about for four books prior to this one. Hunt built them up quite a bit but they were even more horrifying than I imagined. The Cassarabian culture wound up being my favorite part of the book.
3 -
So, Jack Cloudie isn't a bad book. It's just not the action-packed adventure I was hoping for from Stephen Hunt. It's a solid three.
Jack Cloudie fleshes out two aspects of Stephen Hunt's Jackalian saga that have been repeatedly mentioned but never really explored: the airship navy and the womb mages of Cassarabia. It tells the story of Jack Keats gaining acceptance among the crew of the Iron Patridge and Omar becoming a guardsman and learning to not be a lazy ass all the time. The threads are united by a vizier's attempts to wrest the rulership of Cassaraba away from the Eternal Caliph.
Stephen Hunt's steampunk series continues to move forward, although it seems to get more wobbly as it goes. This was not my favorite of his books. Aside from a returning character, most of the cast didn't really engage me. In fact, I found some of them bland and some of them irritating. There wasn't a whole lot going on, either, not compared to his other books. There wasn't a whole lot of excitement to be had, a pity since I've been waiting forever for him to do an airship novel. Both plot threads were fairly standard coming of age tales. I guess the whole thing just felt a little tired. Not surprising since this is the fifth book in the series.
So why did I give it a 3 after I just shat all over it? Well, three reasons.
1 - Commodore Black is the man! I missed Old Blackie. He's easily my favorite character in the entire series.
2 - The womb mages of Cassarabia had been talked about for four books prior to this one. Hunt built them up quite a bit but they were even more horrifying than I imagined. The Cassarabian culture wound up being my favorite part of the book.
3 -
So, Jack Cloudie isn't a bad book. It's just not the action-packed adventure I was hoping for from Stephen Hunt. It's a solid three.
February 22, 2012
I read the first Jackelian book, The Court of the Air, on my honeymoon, and ever since then I've been a Stephen Hunt fan. Each new book has been better than the last, and when I saw that Jack Cloudie was following on the heels of Secrets of the Fire Sea, I was delighted.
And then I read it, and everything fell apart.
I am so disappointed and furious, it actually hurts. I've really loved Hunt's other works, and when he spoke out against the anti-SFF prejudice in the BBC's coverage of World Book Night, I thought he was right on target. Which is why I'm as much baffled as angry at how this book came to be: I simply don't understand how an author who's otherwise written such flawed-and-fierce-yet-functional cultures, awesome female characters and big fantasy plots has managed to so spectacularly backpedal on all three counts.
I'll start with the last of these, as it's the less objectionable. Put simply, the plot of Jack Cloudie is... simple. It's a human war between human nations, and while both sides are driven by a mix of magic and machinations, the story never gets past that level. This isn't a sin in and of itself, except that's not what I've come to expect from Hunt. The Court of the Air was about the re-emergence of deadly ancient gods; The Kingdom Beyond the Waves had a jungle-quest to find a lost city equivalent in myth and function to Atlantis; The Rise of the Iron Moon took the characters into space to battle demonic aliens from a neighbouring planet; and Secrets of the Fire Sea was ultimately concerned with the explosive origins of an entire civilisation and its sibling races. Compared to all this boys-own-adventure archaeology, murder, intrigue and save-the-world grandeur, a treacherous grand vizir and a couple of airship battles doesn't really cut the mustard. And also, seriously? The treacherous grand vizir must be the most over-used cliché of any and all stories set in Middle Eastern analogue societies/caliphates. DO NOT USE IT.
So the book is more... cramped, shall we say, than it's predecessor volumes – concerned with a far smaller stage. Which isn't a crime, per se: it just means the stakes are lower than usual. Admittedly, there's one point at which a prophetic utterance declares that if the fight is lost, the whole world will fall, but we never see any evidence of that, and it doesn't do anything to ramp up the tension.
Next, we have the female characters; or rather, the absence of same. While each of the previous Jackelian books has boasted an amazing heroine – respectively Molly Templar, Amelia Harsh, Purity Drake and Hannah Conquest, all of whom have been POV protagonists – Jack Cloudie has none. Now, while I certainly enjoy the presence of awesome ladies in my fiction, I can still enjoy books without them, being as how chaps and chap-based stories can also be excellent, too. And if these two complaints were my only beefs with the book, then I'd have been happy to shrug and be on my merry way, comfortable in the knowledge that, even if Jack Cloudie wasn't my favourite volume in the series, it was still worth a look-in.
But they're not, and it isn't.
Because what really distressed me about this book – the thing that saw me gritting my teeth and set to fling it across the room – was the constant intertwining of racism and sexism. Charitably, I shall say that both were likely unintentional: as I've said, Hunt has a good track-record prior to this of writing strong cultures and female characters both. But that's not enough to excuse what he's done in Jack Cloudie with a handwave of benevolent intentions. Not by a long shot.
At various points in previous books, we've heard passing mention of Cassarabia: a theocratic caliphate whose much-feared magicians are called womb mages. Through the use of biologicks, womb mages create a variety dreadful chimaeras by impregnating female slaves with genetically engineered, inhuman embryos, which they then are forced, over and over, to gestate and birth. Which is, frankly, vile, and the only reason I've let these asides pass in previous books is because they've been just that: asides. More to the point, they've always been mentioned by enemies of Cassarabia, and so while we've had no specific cause to doubt their verity, neither have they been contextualised in terms of Cassarabian society. By which I mean: Hunt builds viciousness into all his societies, but usually balances it against more positive elements. The atheistic Jackelians, for instance, though nominally democratic, also keep their fallen royalty imprisoned in breeding pens, while the reigning puppet-monarch's arms are always amputated as part of their coronation ceremony – a literal symbolism of the pledge that never again shall a king or queen take up arms against the people. This, too, is awful, but in a way that is shown to be distanced from the day-to-day lives of the populace. Jackelian society is brutal in many ways familiar to Victorian England (on which it is closely modelled), but nonetheless promotes equality in others. So while the womb mages of Cassarabia have previously been invoked as bogey-men by Jackelian characters, it's never been clear whether their terrible practises are sanctioned by an entire society, or are just the darkest aspects of it as manifested at the highest and most brutal levels of power – a unique depravity such as all governments in Hunt's crapsack universe possess.
But as Jack Cloudie all too lamentably makes clear, this is not, in fact, the case. Not only are womb mage sorceries a part of everyday Cassarabian life, they are an integral part: everything from healing to the creation of guards and various animals is their domain, and this is established almost from the word go. Now, admittedly, the only time we actually see the forcibly pregnant women (or producers, as they're called) is in the royal citadel and later at the womb mage capital city; almost every other usage of the term is detached from this reality. And as there's another, more neutral term for their talents – biologicks – it's conceivable that all the non-royal practitioners we encounter just use flesh-manipulation without the aid of female slaves. I'd be slightly happier about the book if this were so, but the fact is that, with only one exception I noted (where the word 'sorcerer' was used), every Cassarabian magic-wielder who was not created or augmented by someone else's magic is called a womb mage; and that bothers the fuck out of me, because it infers that the whole society, in addition to repressing women in other social, religious and cultural ways, is tacitly condoning the continual forced impregnation, abuse and eventual death-by-discard of hundreds of thousands of female slaves.
And look: it's not like I think Hunt thinks that this is a marvellous basis for society. It's that he's written an Arabian/Muslim analogue country where, if possible, the treatment of women is even more fucked up than in the most vile and strawmantastic version of a militant Islamic society that stands for All The Middle East in the deranged fantasies of Frank Miller, and does not seem to think there's anything wrong with this. But I can tell you: reading this book in my lunch room at work, where almost everyone else present was either Muslim or from a majority-Muslim nation, all of them training to be doctors? Did not feel me leaving like a good person for reading it. And that makes me pretty certain that if any of them had chanced to ask about the plot or scan a few pages over my shoulder, they wouldn't have felt happy about it, either.
And then it gets even worse.
I don't think I can convey the full awfulness of the plot any better than the following passage, ripped from the climactic scenes of pages 382 and 383. This is the great revelation of Jack Cloudie, where the true caliph denounces the evil schemes of his treacherous grand vizir – the enemy against whom both the Cassarabian and Jackelian characters have been striving in unison:
“'Hear me. Hear your Caliph Eternal. This is the progress which the Sect of Razat brings you!' shouted the young ruler, his voice carrying far across the quieted hall. 'The progress of slaves and criminals who were born women and who have perverted their bodies towards the male form through the use of an illegal changeling virus. Criminals who have dared to use a variation of that foul virus to turn men into producers to breed unlicensed monstrosities.' His arm swept across the chamber. 'They have done this so that you, all of you, will take their places in the tanks of the producers.'”
Or, in other words: it turns out that the women of Cassarabia have, somewhat understandably, grown sick of being maltreated, and extremely sick of female slaves being used to breed chimaera-monsters until they die. So they've started a cult whose initiation process consists of turning themselves into men (because ladies, if you want to overthrow the patriarchy, YOU MUST YOURSELVES BECOME IT) and have then gone the added step of developing a biologick spell to give men wombs (!) so that they can turn their former oppressors into a new crop of monster-gestating producers. Also, they have simultaneously started a war with the Jackelians to the north, which action is the fulcrum of the entire plot.
And I just. I don't even.
WHAT IN THE EVERLOVING FUCK.
There are so many things wrong with this, I don't even know where to start. Actually, yes, I do. How about the part where the true caliph has been using womb magery on female slaves for fucking CENTURIES prior to this point – a practise which the Jackelians have reviled – and yet, when they free him from the evil sect's clutches, and he gives the above speech to explain what's happened, nobody calls hypocrisy on the fact that womb magery is apparently only deemed a vile and outrageous blasphemy when practised on men, and that this SINGLE FACT is what sways the sect's uninformed followers back to his side? Or the fact that, at the end of the novel, nobody has learned a lesson about Not Forcibly Impregnating People With Monsters and the entire caliphate is left the way it was before, except for the part where the war has stopped? Or how the light-skinned Jackelians effectively put on blackface in order to pass as locals? Or when Commodore Black, the one character who appears in all the Jackelian books, having earlier said that he never takes female compatriots near Cassarabia because of what might happen to them there, explains that the culture and people of Cassarabia have effectively evolved as brutally as they have to cope with living in a desert? Actually, that bit's worth quoting, too:
“'We're here to fight them,' said Jack, 'and it sounds like you admire them.'
'Not so, lad, but I do understand them. Because it's the way of the world. In bright, fertile waters, the fish you see are as shiny as rainbows and swarm in schools as large as clouds. But run your u-boat deep and into the dark barrens, and the fish are tough, bony-looking things, few and fierce. That's the empire. The Cassarabians are warriors. Their land made them that way and they've rolled up all the plumper, richer nations that lady fortune tossed down for them as their neighbours.'”
In other words, they're like that because they live in a desert, and could never have been otherwise.
And then there's the part where Omar, our Cassarabian POV character – who was so obnoxiously arrogant that I spent the whole book wishing him dead – has his entire motivation based around the love of Shadisa, a childhood friend who started hating him (funnily enough) when he physically stopped her from helping another woman escape from an unwanted marriage, whose ultimate punishment, when caught, was to be turned into an edible cactus for the use of passing travellers while possibly still retaining her human sentience. No, seriously: THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENS. And even when Shadisa tells him, over and over to his face, that she hates him now, Omar's only thoughts are for how he saved her from getting caught, too, and how she should really be grateful, and how beautiful she is, and how she's his and he'll save her and they'll be together forever, and how she can't really mean it when she says she doesn't want him, SOMEONE ELSE MUST BE CONTROLLING HER. And how Shadisa then goes on to join the evil cult and turn herself into a man, which Omar thinks of as an abomination, only she still likes him enough that, despite having tried to kill him several times, she also fails to inject him with the womb-giving serum, which he then takes as proof positive that she loved him after all. WHAT?
Or how about where the only other relevant female character, Maya Westwick, starts out as being described as the half-Jackelian, half-Cassarabian daughter of an escaped producer-slave, with her hatred of what was done to her mother as her motivation for everything she does, only it turns out that this is actually a lie, and she's a double-agent for the Cassarabian secret police (though whether willingly or through magically engineered conditioning that make her loyal to the caliph isn't clear – possibly it's both) and apparently doesn't hate womb mages after all? And how, when the sect who rose up in their hatred of how the womb mages mistreat women capture Maya, they threaten to have their womb mages make clones of her? And how it's inferred at the end that actually, the true caliph has been a lady all along?
Yeah. About that.
Jack Cloudie has drained me in so many ways. It's left me feeling wrung-out and sad and furious and betrayed, because the only thing worse than reading a hideously offensive book is reading a hideously offensive book by an author you thought was better than that. I'll always have those first four novels, but if a new one comes out? I don't know. I just don't know.
And then I read it, and everything fell apart.
I am so disappointed and furious, it actually hurts. I've really loved Hunt's other works, and when he spoke out against the anti-SFF prejudice in the BBC's coverage of World Book Night, I thought he was right on target. Which is why I'm as much baffled as angry at how this book came to be: I simply don't understand how an author who's otherwise written such flawed-and-fierce-yet-functional cultures, awesome female characters and big fantasy plots has managed to so spectacularly backpedal on all three counts.
I'll start with the last of these, as it's the less objectionable. Put simply, the plot of Jack Cloudie is... simple. It's a human war between human nations, and while both sides are driven by a mix of magic and machinations, the story never gets past that level. This isn't a sin in and of itself, except that's not what I've come to expect from Hunt. The Court of the Air was about the re-emergence of deadly ancient gods; The Kingdom Beyond the Waves had a jungle-quest to find a lost city equivalent in myth and function to Atlantis; The Rise of the Iron Moon took the characters into space to battle demonic aliens from a neighbouring planet; and Secrets of the Fire Sea was ultimately concerned with the explosive origins of an entire civilisation and its sibling races. Compared to all this boys-own-adventure archaeology, murder, intrigue and save-the-world grandeur, a treacherous grand vizir and a couple of airship battles doesn't really cut the mustard. And also, seriously? The treacherous grand vizir must be the most over-used cliché of any and all stories set in Middle Eastern analogue societies/caliphates. DO NOT USE IT.
So the book is more... cramped, shall we say, than it's predecessor volumes – concerned with a far smaller stage. Which isn't a crime, per se: it just means the stakes are lower than usual. Admittedly, there's one point at which a prophetic utterance declares that if the fight is lost, the whole world will fall, but we never see any evidence of that, and it doesn't do anything to ramp up the tension.
Next, we have the female characters; or rather, the absence of same. While each of the previous Jackelian books has boasted an amazing heroine – respectively Molly Templar, Amelia Harsh, Purity Drake and Hannah Conquest, all of whom have been POV protagonists – Jack Cloudie has none. Now, while I certainly enjoy the presence of awesome ladies in my fiction, I can still enjoy books without them, being as how chaps and chap-based stories can also be excellent, too. And if these two complaints were my only beefs with the book, then I'd have been happy to shrug and be on my merry way, comfortable in the knowledge that, even if Jack Cloudie wasn't my favourite volume in the series, it was still worth a look-in.
But they're not, and it isn't.
Because what really distressed me about this book – the thing that saw me gritting my teeth and set to fling it across the room – was the constant intertwining of racism and sexism. Charitably, I shall say that both were likely unintentional: as I've said, Hunt has a good track-record prior to this of writing strong cultures and female characters both. But that's not enough to excuse what he's done in Jack Cloudie with a handwave of benevolent intentions. Not by a long shot.
At various points in previous books, we've heard passing mention of Cassarabia: a theocratic caliphate whose much-feared magicians are called womb mages. Through the use of biologicks, womb mages create a variety dreadful chimaeras by impregnating female slaves with genetically engineered, inhuman embryos, which they then are forced, over and over, to gestate and birth. Which is, frankly, vile, and the only reason I've let these asides pass in previous books is because they've been just that: asides. More to the point, they've always been mentioned by enemies of Cassarabia, and so while we've had no specific cause to doubt their verity, neither have they been contextualised in terms of Cassarabian society. By which I mean: Hunt builds viciousness into all his societies, but usually balances it against more positive elements. The atheistic Jackelians, for instance, though nominally democratic, also keep their fallen royalty imprisoned in breeding pens, while the reigning puppet-monarch's arms are always amputated as part of their coronation ceremony – a literal symbolism of the pledge that never again shall a king or queen take up arms against the people. This, too, is awful, but in a way that is shown to be distanced from the day-to-day lives of the populace. Jackelian society is brutal in many ways familiar to Victorian England (on which it is closely modelled), but nonetheless promotes equality in others. So while the womb mages of Cassarabia have previously been invoked as bogey-men by Jackelian characters, it's never been clear whether their terrible practises are sanctioned by an entire society, or are just the darkest aspects of it as manifested at the highest and most brutal levels of power – a unique depravity such as all governments in Hunt's crapsack universe possess.
But as Jack Cloudie all too lamentably makes clear, this is not, in fact, the case. Not only are womb mage sorceries a part of everyday Cassarabian life, they are an integral part: everything from healing to the creation of guards and various animals is their domain, and this is established almost from the word go. Now, admittedly, the only time we actually see the forcibly pregnant women (or producers, as they're called) is in the royal citadel and later at the womb mage capital city; almost every other usage of the term is detached from this reality. And as there's another, more neutral term for their talents – biologicks – it's conceivable that all the non-royal practitioners we encounter just use flesh-manipulation without the aid of female slaves. I'd be slightly happier about the book if this were so, but the fact is that, with only one exception I noted (where the word 'sorcerer' was used), every Cassarabian magic-wielder who was not created or augmented by someone else's magic is called a womb mage; and that bothers the fuck out of me, because it infers that the whole society, in addition to repressing women in other social, religious and cultural ways, is tacitly condoning the continual forced impregnation, abuse and eventual death-by-discard of hundreds of thousands of female slaves.
And look: it's not like I think Hunt thinks that this is a marvellous basis for society. It's that he's written an Arabian/Muslim analogue country where, if possible, the treatment of women is even more fucked up than in the most vile and strawmantastic version of a militant Islamic society that stands for All The Middle East in the deranged fantasies of Frank Miller, and does not seem to think there's anything wrong with this. But I can tell you: reading this book in my lunch room at work, where almost everyone else present was either Muslim or from a majority-Muslim nation, all of them training to be doctors? Did not feel me leaving like a good person for reading it. And that makes me pretty certain that if any of them had chanced to ask about the plot or scan a few pages over my shoulder, they wouldn't have felt happy about it, either.
And then it gets even worse.
I don't think I can convey the full awfulness of the plot any better than the following passage, ripped from the climactic scenes of pages 382 and 383. This is the great revelation of Jack Cloudie, where the true caliph denounces the evil schemes of his treacherous grand vizir – the enemy against whom both the Cassarabian and Jackelian characters have been striving in unison:
“'Hear me. Hear your Caliph Eternal. This is the progress which the Sect of Razat brings you!' shouted the young ruler, his voice carrying far across the quieted hall. 'The progress of slaves and criminals who were born women and who have perverted their bodies towards the male form through the use of an illegal changeling virus. Criminals who have dared to use a variation of that foul virus to turn men into producers to breed unlicensed monstrosities.' His arm swept across the chamber. 'They have done this so that you, all of you, will take their places in the tanks of the producers.'”
Or, in other words: it turns out that the women of Cassarabia have, somewhat understandably, grown sick of being maltreated, and extremely sick of female slaves being used to breed chimaera-monsters until they die. So they've started a cult whose initiation process consists of turning themselves into men (because ladies, if you want to overthrow the patriarchy, YOU MUST YOURSELVES BECOME IT) and have then gone the added step of developing a biologick spell to give men wombs (!) so that they can turn their former oppressors into a new crop of monster-gestating producers. Also, they have simultaneously started a war with the Jackelians to the north, which action is the fulcrum of the entire plot.
And I just. I don't even.
WHAT IN THE EVERLOVING FUCK.
There are so many things wrong with this, I don't even know where to start. Actually, yes, I do. How about the part where the true caliph has been using womb magery on female slaves for fucking CENTURIES prior to this point – a practise which the Jackelians have reviled – and yet, when they free him from the evil sect's clutches, and he gives the above speech to explain what's happened, nobody calls hypocrisy on the fact that womb magery is apparently only deemed a vile and outrageous blasphemy when practised on men, and that this SINGLE FACT is what sways the sect's uninformed followers back to his side? Or the fact that, at the end of the novel, nobody has learned a lesson about Not Forcibly Impregnating People With Monsters and the entire caliphate is left the way it was before, except for the part where the war has stopped? Or how the light-skinned Jackelians effectively put on blackface in order to pass as locals? Or when Commodore Black, the one character who appears in all the Jackelian books, having earlier said that he never takes female compatriots near Cassarabia because of what might happen to them there, explains that the culture and people of Cassarabia have effectively evolved as brutally as they have to cope with living in a desert? Actually, that bit's worth quoting, too:
“'We're here to fight them,' said Jack, 'and it sounds like you admire them.'
'Not so, lad, but I do understand them. Because it's the way of the world. In bright, fertile waters, the fish you see are as shiny as rainbows and swarm in schools as large as clouds. But run your u-boat deep and into the dark barrens, and the fish are tough, bony-looking things, few and fierce. That's the empire. The Cassarabians are warriors. Their land made them that way and they've rolled up all the plumper, richer nations that lady fortune tossed down for them as their neighbours.'”
In other words, they're like that because they live in a desert, and could never have been otherwise.
And then there's the part where Omar, our Cassarabian POV character – who was so obnoxiously arrogant that I spent the whole book wishing him dead – has his entire motivation based around the love of Shadisa, a childhood friend who started hating him (funnily enough) when he physically stopped her from helping another woman escape from an unwanted marriage, whose ultimate punishment, when caught, was to be turned into an edible cactus for the use of passing travellers while possibly still retaining her human sentience. No, seriously: THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENS. And even when Shadisa tells him, over and over to his face, that she hates him now, Omar's only thoughts are for how he saved her from getting caught, too, and how she should really be grateful, and how beautiful she is, and how she's his and he'll save her and they'll be together forever, and how she can't really mean it when she says she doesn't want him, SOMEONE ELSE MUST BE CONTROLLING HER. And how Shadisa then goes on to join the evil cult and turn herself into a man, which Omar thinks of as an abomination, only she still likes him enough that, despite having tried to kill him several times, she also fails to inject him with the womb-giving serum, which he then takes as proof positive that she loved him after all. WHAT?
Or how about where the only other relevant female character, Maya Westwick, starts out as being described as the half-Jackelian, half-Cassarabian daughter of an escaped producer-slave, with her hatred of what was done to her mother as her motivation for everything she does, only it turns out that this is actually a lie, and she's a double-agent for the Cassarabian secret police (though whether willingly or through magically engineered conditioning that make her loyal to the caliph isn't clear – possibly it's both) and apparently doesn't hate womb mages after all? And how, when the sect who rose up in their hatred of how the womb mages mistreat women capture Maya, they threaten to have their womb mages make clones of her? And how it's inferred at the end that actually, the true caliph has been a lady all along?
Yeah. About that.
Jack Cloudie has drained me in so many ways. It's left me feeling wrung-out and sad and furious and betrayed, because the only thing worse than reading a hideously offensive book is reading a hideously offensive book by an author you thought was better than that. I'll always have those first four novels, but if a new one comes out? I don't know. I just don't know.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 2, 2015
Good plotting, excellent pacing, fine twists and an unforgettable denouement. Very well done, Mr. Stephen Hunt!
September 4, 2011
This is the 5th adventure set in the Jackelian series. After reading the 1st book in the series,The Court of the Air, I became addicted and bought all of them. They continued to get better with each book. However, I don't think i feel the same about this one.
It's a great read, but I have a couple complaints. Well, one main complaint. Gone are the concurrently running multiple storylines that I so loved. There are only 2 storylines in this story. That is most likely a plus for many readers, but a negative for me. I don't know if Hunt succumbed to the complaints of too much going on at once in his stories or if he was simply running out of plot lines. I suspect the former.
Still reading...
Finished it and my opinion remains the same. This installment doesn't hold up to the quality writing of the previous books imo. Tropes and phrases that Hunt commonly employs throughout the series are no longer fresh and engaging, but tiring and overused.
It's a great read, but I have a couple complaints. Well, one main complaint. Gone are the concurrently running multiple storylines that I so loved. There are only 2 storylines in this story. That is most likely a plus for many readers, but a negative for me. I don't know if Hunt succumbed to the complaints of too much going on at once in his stories or if he was simply running out of plot lines. I suspect the former.
Still reading...
Finished it and my opinion remains the same. This installment doesn't hold up to the quality writing of the previous books imo. Tropes and phrases that Hunt commonly employs throughout the series are no longer fresh and engaging, but tiring and overused.
August 16, 2011
Thanks to his father’s gambling debts, young Jack Keats finds himself on the streets trying to graft enough coin to keep him and his two younger brothers fed.
When a daring bank robbery goes awry, Jack narrowly escapes the scaffold on to be pressed into the Royal Aerostatical Navy. Assigned to the most useless airship in the fleet, serving under a captain who’s is most probably mad, Jack seems to be bound for almost certain death in the far-away deserts of Cassarabia.
Meanwhile on the other side of the world, Omar ibn Barir, the slave of a rich merchant lord, is unexpectedly freed and enters into the service of the Caliph’s military forces – just as war is brewing.
Two very similar young men prepare to face each other across senseless field of war. But is Omar the enemy, or is Jack’s true nemesis the sickness at the heart of the Caliph’s court? If Jack and his shipmates can discover what Cassarabia’s aggressive new regime is trying to conceal, he might survive the most horrific of wars and clear his family’s name. If not…
I have to admit that prior to picking up Jack Cloudie I hadn’t read any of Stephen Hunt’s previous novels. I’d heard his name mentioned around the Internet but I had never considered actively seeking out any of his work. What changed then? Why am I reviewing the fifth book in an ongoing series? Shortly after my last birthday at the end of July I was in my local bookshop and I spotted the cover for the book. A Victorian gentleman dressed to the nines with a top hat and cane. In the background, airships float in the evening sky. I have to admit I was intrigued and decided, on the strength of this cover, I’d give the book a go.
I am so glad I went with my gut and took a chance on this. Hunt’s writing has a splendidly evocative feel about. I was quickly drawn in to the tale of escalating conflict between two warring nations on an alternate Earth. Jack Cloudie follows the forces of The Kingdom of the Jackals, think a steam-powered Victorian-era British Empire, in their war with the Cassarabians, an empire in the Middle East who favour biotechnology over the steam engine.
Caught in the middle of various political machinations the reader is introduced to Jack Keats and Omar ibn Barir. The two young men have been forced, due to circumstance, to grow up before their time. Each is trying hard to survive as events spiral out of control all around them. Initially there are two separate narrative strands that alternate, following each of the young men independently, but eventually the two meet as the novel hurtles toward an epic climax where the fate of nations will be decided.
The fantastical elements of this story are where the writing really excels. The Royal Aerostatical Navy airship, The Iron Partridge, is a great setting for Jack’s induction into the military. The term ‘Jack Cloudie’ is the nickname that refers to those that serve on the ship. Each of characters Keats comes into contact with is vividly realised. A personal favourite for me was John Oldcastle, who I believe appeared under a different guise in a number of previous novels.
Meanwhile Omar is introduced to the biologicks (bio-engineered creatures) created by the Cassarabians priesthood. Due to a lack of the resources the Jackals use the Cassarabians have been forced to develop their technology in a completely different way. The different biologick variants have been designed to do everything. They form the bodyguard for the Eternal Caliph, act as beasts of burden, even draw salt from sea water.
Jack Cloudie is real rollercoaster of a novel. Loads of fast paced action sprinkled with intelligent characterisation and memorable events. Stephen Hunt has created a fully realized world featuring some truly inventive ideas. The good news is that there are another four novels prior to Jack Cloudie set in the same shared universe that I can look forward to reading. The great news is that there is another book due for release in the future. This is a splendid, self-contained tale that was a delight to read.
When a daring bank robbery goes awry, Jack narrowly escapes the scaffold on to be pressed into the Royal Aerostatical Navy. Assigned to the most useless airship in the fleet, serving under a captain who’s is most probably mad, Jack seems to be bound for almost certain death in the far-away deserts of Cassarabia.
Meanwhile on the other side of the world, Omar ibn Barir, the slave of a rich merchant lord, is unexpectedly freed and enters into the service of the Caliph’s military forces – just as war is brewing.
Two very similar young men prepare to face each other across senseless field of war. But is Omar the enemy, or is Jack’s true nemesis the sickness at the heart of the Caliph’s court? If Jack and his shipmates can discover what Cassarabia’s aggressive new regime is trying to conceal, he might survive the most horrific of wars and clear his family’s name. If not…
I have to admit that prior to picking up Jack Cloudie I hadn’t read any of Stephen Hunt’s previous novels. I’d heard his name mentioned around the Internet but I had never considered actively seeking out any of his work. What changed then? Why am I reviewing the fifth book in an ongoing series? Shortly after my last birthday at the end of July I was in my local bookshop and I spotted the cover for the book. A Victorian gentleman dressed to the nines with a top hat and cane. In the background, airships float in the evening sky. I have to admit I was intrigued and decided, on the strength of this cover, I’d give the book a go.
I am so glad I went with my gut and took a chance on this. Hunt’s writing has a splendidly evocative feel about. I was quickly drawn in to the tale of escalating conflict between two warring nations on an alternate Earth. Jack Cloudie follows the forces of The Kingdom of the Jackals, think a steam-powered Victorian-era British Empire, in their war with the Cassarabians, an empire in the Middle East who favour biotechnology over the steam engine.
Caught in the middle of various political machinations the reader is introduced to Jack Keats and Omar ibn Barir. The two young men have been forced, due to circumstance, to grow up before their time. Each is trying hard to survive as events spiral out of control all around them. Initially there are two separate narrative strands that alternate, following each of the young men independently, but eventually the two meet as the novel hurtles toward an epic climax where the fate of nations will be decided.
The fantastical elements of this story are where the writing really excels. The Royal Aerostatical Navy airship, The Iron Partridge, is a great setting for Jack’s induction into the military. The term ‘Jack Cloudie’ is the nickname that refers to those that serve on the ship. Each of characters Keats comes into contact with is vividly realised. A personal favourite for me was John Oldcastle, who I believe appeared under a different guise in a number of previous novels.
Meanwhile Omar is introduced to the biologicks (bio-engineered creatures) created by the Cassarabians priesthood. Due to a lack of the resources the Jackals use the Cassarabians have been forced to develop their technology in a completely different way. The different biologick variants have been designed to do everything. They form the bodyguard for the Eternal Caliph, act as beasts of burden, even draw salt from sea water.
Jack Cloudie is real rollercoaster of a novel. Loads of fast paced action sprinkled with intelligent characterisation and memorable events. Stephen Hunt has created a fully realized world featuring some truly inventive ideas. The good news is that there are another four novels prior to Jack Cloudie set in the same shared universe that I can look forward to reading. The great news is that there is another book due for release in the future. This is a splendid, self-contained tale that was a delight to read.
September 23, 2012
Hunt manages to deliver a good solid story set in his familiar world of Jackals and Cassarabia. While not as massively inventive as his first 2 or 3 books he still delivers a very enjoyable read with mainly new characters.
December 25, 2012
** spoiler alert ** I read the first Jackelian book, The Court of the Air, on my honeymoon, and ever since then I've been a Stephen Hunt fan. Each new book has been better than the last, and when I saw that Jack Cloudie was following on the heels of Secrets of the Fire Sea, I was delighted.
And then I read it, and everything fell apart.
I am so disappointed and furious, it actually hurts. I've really loved Hunt's other works, and when he spoke out against the anti-SFF prejudice in the BBC's coverage of World Book Night, I thought he was right on target. Which is why I'm as much baffled as angry at how this book came to be: I simply don't understand how an author who's otherwise written such flawed-and-fierce-yet-functional cultures, awesome female characters and big fantasy plots has managed to so spectacularly backpedal on all three counts.
I'll start with the last of these, as it's the less objectionable. Put simply, the plot of Jack Cloudie is... simple. It's a human war between human nations, and while both sides are driven by a mix of magic and machinations, the story never gets past that level. This isn't a sin in and of itself, except that's not what I've come to expect from Hunt. The Court of the Air was about the re-emergence of deadly ancient gods; The Kingdom Beyond the Waves had a jungle-quest to find a lost city equivalent in myth and function to Atlantis; The Rise of the Iron Moon took the characters into space to battle demonic aliens from a neighbouring planet; and Secrets of the Fire Sea was ultimately concerned with the explosive origins of an entire civilisation and its sibling races. Compared to all this boys-own-adventure archaeology, murder, intrigue and save-the-world grandeur, a treacherous grand vizir and a couple of airship battles doesn't really cut the mustard. And also, seriously? The treacherous grand vizir must be the most over-used cliché of any and all stories set in Middle Eastern analogue societies/caliphates. DO NOT USE IT.
So the book is more... cramped, shall we say, than it's predecessor volumes – concerned with a far smaller stage. Which isn't a crime, per se: it just means the stakes are lower than usual. Admittedly, there's one point at which a prophetic utterance declares that if the fight is lost, the whole world will fall, but we never see any evidence of that, and it doesn't do anything to ramp up the tension.
Next, we have the female characters; or rather, the absence of same. While each of the previous Jackelian books has boasted an amazing heroine – respectively Molly Templar, Amelia Harsh, Purity Drake and Hannah Conquest, all of whom have been POV protagonists – Jack Cloudie has none. Now, while I certainly enjoy the presence of awesome ladies in my fiction, I can still enjoy books without them, being as how chaps and chap-based stories can also be excellent, too. And if these two complaints were my only beefs with the book, then I'd have been happy to shrug and be on my merry way, comfortable in the knowledge that, even if Jack Cloudie wasn't my favourite volume in the series, it was still worth a look-in.
But they're not, and it isn't.
Because what really distressed me about this book – the thing that saw me gritting my teeth and set to fling it across the room – was the constant intertwining of racism and sexism. Charitably, I shall say that both were likely unintentional: as I've said, Hunt has a good track-record prior to this of writing strong cultures and female characters both. But that's not enough to excuse what he's done in Jack Cloudie with a handwave of benevolent intentions. Not by a long shot.
At various points in previous books, we've heard passing mention of Cassarabia: a theocratic caliphate whose much-feared magicians are called womb mages. Through the use of biologicks, womb mages create a variety dreadful chimaeras by impregnating female slaves with genetically engineered, inhuman embryos, which they then are forced, over and over, to gestate and birth. Which is, frankly, vile, and the only reason I've let these asides pass in previous books is because they've been just that: asides. More to the point, they've always been mentioned by enemies of Cassarabia, and so while we've had no specific cause to doubt their verity, neither have they been contextualised in terms of Cassarabian society. By which I mean: Hunt builds viciousness into all his societies, but usually balances it against more positive elements. The atheistic Jackelians, for instance, though nominally democratic, also keep their fallen royalty imprisoned in breeding pens, while the reigning puppet-monarch's arms are always amputated as part of their coronation ceremony – a literal symbolism of the pledge that never again shall a king or queen take up arms against the people. This, too, is awful, but in a way that is shown to be distanced from the day-to-day lives of the populace. Jackelian society is brutal in many ways familiar to Victorian England (on which it is closely modelled), but nonetheless promotes equality in others. So while the womb mages of Cassarabia have previously been invoked as bogey-men by Jackelian characters, it's never been clear whether their terrible practises are sanctioned by an entire society, or are just the darkest aspects of it as manifested at the highest and most brutal levels of power – a unique depravity such as all governments in Hunt's crapsack universe possess.
But as Jack Cloudie all too lamentably makes clear, this is not, in fact, the case. Not only are womb mage sorceries a part of everyday Cassarabian life, they are an integral part: everything from healing to the creation of guards and various animals is their domain, and this is established almost from the word go. Now, admittedly, the only time we actually see the forcibly pregnant women (or producers, as they're called) is in the royal citadel and later at the womb mage capital city; almost every other usage of the term is detached from this reality. And as there's another, more neutral term for their talents – biologicks – it's conceivable that all the non-royal practitioners we encounter just use flesh-manipulation without the aid of female slaves. I'd be slightly happier about the book if this were so, but the fact is that, with only one exception I noted (where the word 'sorcerer' was used), every Cassarabian magic-wielder who was not created or augmented by someone else's magic is called a womb mage; and that bothers the fuck out of me, because it infers that the whole society, in addition to repressing women in other social, religious and cultural ways, is tacitly condoning the continual forced impregnation, abuse and eventual death-by-discard of hundreds of thousands of female slaves.
And look: it's not like I think Hunt thinks that this is a marvellous basis for society. It's that he's written an Arabian/Muslim analogue country where, if possible, the treatment of women is even more fucked up than in the most vile and strawmantastic version of a militant Islamic society that stands for All The Middle East in the deranged fantasies of Frank Miller, and does not seem to think there's anything wrong with this. But I can tell you: reading this book in my lunch room at work, where almost everyone else present was either Muslim or from a majority-Muslim nation, all of them training to be doctors? Did not feel me leaving like a good person for reading it. And that makes me pretty certain that if any of them had chanced to ask about the plot or scan a few pages over my shoulder, they wouldn't have felt happy about it, either.
And then it gets even worse.
I don't think I can convey the full awfulness of the plot any better than the following passage, ripped from the climactic scenes of pages 382 and 383. This is the great revelation of Jack Cloudie, where the true caliph denounces the evil schemes of his treacherous grand vizir – the enemy against whom both the Cassarabian and Jackelian characters have been striving in unison:
“'Hear me. Hear your Caliph Eternal. This is the progress which the Sect of Razat brings you!' shouted the young ruler, his voice carrying far across the quieted hall. 'The progress of slaves and criminals who were born women and who have perverted their bodies towards the male form through the use of an illegal changeling virus. Criminals who have dared to use a variation of that foul virus to turn men into producers to breed unlicensed monstrosities.' His arm swept across the chamber. 'They have done this so that you, all of you, will take their places in the tanks of the producers.'”
Or, in other words: it turns out that the women of Cassarabia have, somewhat understandably, grown sick of being maltreated, and extremely sick of female slaves being used to breed chimaera-monsters until they die. So they've started a cult whose initiation process consists of turning themselves into men (because ladies, if you want to overthrow the patriarchy, YOU MUST YOURSELVES BECOME IT) and have then gone the added step of developing a biologick spell to give men wombs (!) so that they can turn their former oppressors into a new crop of monster-gestating producers. Also, they have simultaneously started a war with the Jackelians to the north, which action is the fulcrum of the entire plot.
And I just. I don't even.
WHAT IN THE EVERLOVING FUCK.
There are so many things wrong with this, I don't even know where to start. Actually, yes, I do. How about the part where the true caliph has been using womb magery on female slaves for fucking CENTURIES prior to this point – a practise which the Jackelians have reviled – and yet, when they free him from the evil sect's clutches, and he gives the above speech to explain what's happened, nobody calls hypocrisy on the fact that womb magery is apparently only deemed a vile and outrageous blasphemy when practised on men, and that this SINGLE FACT is what sways the sect's uninformed followers back to his side? Or the fact that, at the end of the novel, nobody has learned a lesson about Not Forcibly Impregnating People With Monsters and the entire caliphate is left the way it was before, except for the part where the war has stopped? Or how the light-skinned Jackelians effectively put on blackface in order to pass as locals? Or when Commodore Black, the one character who appears in all the Jackelian books, having earlier said that he never takes female compatriots near Cassarabia because of what might happen to them there, explains that the culture and people of Cassarabia have effectively evolved as brutally as they have to cope with living in a desert? Actually, that bit's worth quoting, too:
“'We're here to fight them,' said Jack, 'and it sounds like you admire them.'
'Not so, lad, but I do understand them. Because it's the way of the world. In bright, fertile waters, the fish you see are as shiny as rainbows and swarm in schools as large as clouds. But run your u-boat deep and into the dark barrens, and the fish are tough, bony-looking things, few and fierce. That's the empire. The Cassarabians are warriors. Their land made them that way and they've rolled up all the plumper, richer nations that lady fortune tossed down for them as their neighbours.'”
In other words, they're like that because they live in a desert, and could never have been otherwise.
And then there's the part where Omar, our Cassarabian POV character – who was so obnoxiously arrogant that I spent the whole book wishing him dead – has his entire motivation based around the love of Shadisa, a childhood friend who started hating him (funnily enough) when he physically stopped her from helping another woman escape from an unwanted marriage, whose ultimate punishment, when caught, was to be turned into an edible cactus for the use of passing travellers while possibly still retaining her human sentience. No, seriously: THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENS. And even when Shadisa tells him, over and over to his face, that she hates him now, Omar's only thoughts are for how he saved her from getting caught, too, and how she should really be grateful, and how beautiful she is, and how she's his and he'll save her and they'll be together forever, and how she can't really mean it when she says she doesn't want him, SOMEONE ELSE MUST BE CONTROLLING HER. And how Shadisa then goes on to join the evil cult and turn herself into a man, which Omar thinks of as an abomination, only she still likes him enough that, despite having tried to kill him several times, she also fails to inject him with the womb-giving serum, which he then takes as proof positive that she loved him after all. WHAT?
Or how about where the only other relevant female character, Maya Westwick, starts out as being described as the half-Jackelian, half-Cassarabian daughter of an escaped producer-slave, with her hatred of what was done to her mother as her motivation for everything she does, only it turns out that this is actually a lie, and she's a double-agent for the Cassarabian secret police (though whether willingly or through magically engineered conditioning that make her loyal to the caliph isn't clear – possibly it's both) and apparently doesn't hate womb mages after all? And how, when the sect who rose up in their hatred of how the womb mages mistreat women capture Maya, they threaten to have their womb mages make clones of her? And how it's inferred at the end that actually, the true caliph has been a lady all along?
Yeah. About that.
Jack Cloudie has drained me in so many ways. It's left me feeling wrung-out and sad and furious and betrayed, because the only thing worse than reading a hideously offensive book is reading a hideously offensive book by an author you thought was better than that. I'll always have those first four novels, but if a new one comes out? I don't know. I just don't know.
And then I read it, and everything fell apart.
I am so disappointed and furious, it actually hurts. I've really loved Hunt's other works, and when he spoke out against the anti-SFF prejudice in the BBC's coverage of World Book Night, I thought he was right on target. Which is why I'm as much baffled as angry at how this book came to be: I simply don't understand how an author who's otherwise written such flawed-and-fierce-yet-functional cultures, awesome female characters and big fantasy plots has managed to so spectacularly backpedal on all three counts.
I'll start with the last of these, as it's the less objectionable. Put simply, the plot of Jack Cloudie is... simple. It's a human war between human nations, and while both sides are driven by a mix of magic and machinations, the story never gets past that level. This isn't a sin in and of itself, except that's not what I've come to expect from Hunt. The Court of the Air was about the re-emergence of deadly ancient gods; The Kingdom Beyond the Waves had a jungle-quest to find a lost city equivalent in myth and function to Atlantis; The Rise of the Iron Moon took the characters into space to battle demonic aliens from a neighbouring planet; and Secrets of the Fire Sea was ultimately concerned with the explosive origins of an entire civilisation and its sibling races. Compared to all this boys-own-adventure archaeology, murder, intrigue and save-the-world grandeur, a treacherous grand vizir and a couple of airship battles doesn't really cut the mustard. And also, seriously? The treacherous grand vizir must be the most over-used cliché of any and all stories set in Middle Eastern analogue societies/caliphates. DO NOT USE IT.
So the book is more... cramped, shall we say, than it's predecessor volumes – concerned with a far smaller stage. Which isn't a crime, per se: it just means the stakes are lower than usual. Admittedly, there's one point at which a prophetic utterance declares that if the fight is lost, the whole world will fall, but we never see any evidence of that, and it doesn't do anything to ramp up the tension.
Next, we have the female characters; or rather, the absence of same. While each of the previous Jackelian books has boasted an amazing heroine – respectively Molly Templar, Amelia Harsh, Purity Drake and Hannah Conquest, all of whom have been POV protagonists – Jack Cloudie has none. Now, while I certainly enjoy the presence of awesome ladies in my fiction, I can still enjoy books without them, being as how chaps and chap-based stories can also be excellent, too. And if these two complaints were my only beefs with the book, then I'd have been happy to shrug and be on my merry way, comfortable in the knowledge that, even if Jack Cloudie wasn't my favourite volume in the series, it was still worth a look-in.
But they're not, and it isn't.
Because what really distressed me about this book – the thing that saw me gritting my teeth and set to fling it across the room – was the constant intertwining of racism and sexism. Charitably, I shall say that both were likely unintentional: as I've said, Hunt has a good track-record prior to this of writing strong cultures and female characters both. But that's not enough to excuse what he's done in Jack Cloudie with a handwave of benevolent intentions. Not by a long shot.
At various points in previous books, we've heard passing mention of Cassarabia: a theocratic caliphate whose much-feared magicians are called womb mages. Through the use of biologicks, womb mages create a variety dreadful chimaeras by impregnating female slaves with genetically engineered, inhuman embryos, which they then are forced, over and over, to gestate and birth. Which is, frankly, vile, and the only reason I've let these asides pass in previous books is because they've been just that: asides. More to the point, they've always been mentioned by enemies of Cassarabia, and so while we've had no specific cause to doubt their verity, neither have they been contextualised in terms of Cassarabian society. By which I mean: Hunt builds viciousness into all his societies, but usually balances it against more positive elements. The atheistic Jackelians, for instance, though nominally democratic, also keep their fallen royalty imprisoned in breeding pens, while the reigning puppet-monarch's arms are always amputated as part of their coronation ceremony – a literal symbolism of the pledge that never again shall a king or queen take up arms against the people. This, too, is awful, but in a way that is shown to be distanced from the day-to-day lives of the populace. Jackelian society is brutal in many ways familiar to Victorian England (on which it is closely modelled), but nonetheless promotes equality in others. So while the womb mages of Cassarabia have previously been invoked as bogey-men by Jackelian characters, it's never been clear whether their terrible practises are sanctioned by an entire society, or are just the darkest aspects of it as manifested at the highest and most brutal levels of power – a unique depravity such as all governments in Hunt's crapsack universe possess.
But as Jack Cloudie all too lamentably makes clear, this is not, in fact, the case. Not only are womb mage sorceries a part of everyday Cassarabian life, they are an integral part: everything from healing to the creation of guards and various animals is their domain, and this is established almost from the word go. Now, admittedly, the only time we actually see the forcibly pregnant women (or producers, as they're called) is in the royal citadel and later at the womb mage capital city; almost every other usage of the term is detached from this reality. And as there's another, more neutral term for their talents – biologicks – it's conceivable that all the non-royal practitioners we encounter just use flesh-manipulation without the aid of female slaves. I'd be slightly happier about the book if this were so, but the fact is that, with only one exception I noted (where the word 'sorcerer' was used), every Cassarabian magic-wielder who was not created or augmented by someone else's magic is called a womb mage; and that bothers the fuck out of me, because it infers that the whole society, in addition to repressing women in other social, religious and cultural ways, is tacitly condoning the continual forced impregnation, abuse and eventual death-by-discard of hundreds of thousands of female slaves.
And look: it's not like I think Hunt thinks that this is a marvellous basis for society. It's that he's written an Arabian/Muslim analogue country where, if possible, the treatment of women is even more fucked up than in the most vile and strawmantastic version of a militant Islamic society that stands for All The Middle East in the deranged fantasies of Frank Miller, and does not seem to think there's anything wrong with this. But I can tell you: reading this book in my lunch room at work, where almost everyone else present was either Muslim or from a majority-Muslim nation, all of them training to be doctors? Did not feel me leaving like a good person for reading it. And that makes me pretty certain that if any of them had chanced to ask about the plot or scan a few pages over my shoulder, they wouldn't have felt happy about it, either.
And then it gets even worse.
I don't think I can convey the full awfulness of the plot any better than the following passage, ripped from the climactic scenes of pages 382 and 383. This is the great revelation of Jack Cloudie, where the true caliph denounces the evil schemes of his treacherous grand vizir – the enemy against whom both the Cassarabian and Jackelian characters have been striving in unison:
“'Hear me. Hear your Caliph Eternal. This is the progress which the Sect of Razat brings you!' shouted the young ruler, his voice carrying far across the quieted hall. 'The progress of slaves and criminals who were born women and who have perverted their bodies towards the male form through the use of an illegal changeling virus. Criminals who have dared to use a variation of that foul virus to turn men into producers to breed unlicensed monstrosities.' His arm swept across the chamber. 'They have done this so that you, all of you, will take their places in the tanks of the producers.'”
Or, in other words: it turns out that the women of Cassarabia have, somewhat understandably, grown sick of being maltreated, and extremely sick of female slaves being used to breed chimaera-monsters until they die. So they've started a cult whose initiation process consists of turning themselves into men (because ladies, if you want to overthrow the patriarchy, YOU MUST YOURSELVES BECOME IT) and have then gone the added step of developing a biologick spell to give men wombs (!) so that they can turn their former oppressors into a new crop of monster-gestating producers. Also, they have simultaneously started a war with the Jackelians to the north, which action is the fulcrum of the entire plot.
And I just. I don't even.
WHAT IN THE EVERLOVING FUCK.
There are so many things wrong with this, I don't even know where to start. Actually, yes, I do. How about the part where the true caliph has been using womb magery on female slaves for fucking CENTURIES prior to this point – a practise which the Jackelians have reviled – and yet, when they free him from the evil sect's clutches, and he gives the above speech to explain what's happened, nobody calls hypocrisy on the fact that womb magery is apparently only deemed a vile and outrageous blasphemy when practised on men, and that this SINGLE FACT is what sways the sect's uninformed followers back to his side? Or the fact that, at the end of the novel, nobody has learned a lesson about Not Forcibly Impregnating People With Monsters and the entire caliphate is left the way it was before, except for the part where the war has stopped? Or how the light-skinned Jackelians effectively put on blackface in order to pass as locals? Or when Commodore Black, the one character who appears in all the Jackelian books, having earlier said that he never takes female compatriots near Cassarabia because of what might happen to them there, explains that the culture and people of Cassarabia have effectively evolved as brutally as they have to cope with living in a desert? Actually, that bit's worth quoting, too:
“'We're here to fight them,' said Jack, 'and it sounds like you admire them.'
'Not so, lad, but I do understand them. Because it's the way of the world. In bright, fertile waters, the fish you see are as shiny as rainbows and swarm in schools as large as clouds. But run your u-boat deep and into the dark barrens, and the fish are tough, bony-looking things, few and fierce. That's the empire. The Cassarabians are warriors. Their land made them that way and they've rolled up all the plumper, richer nations that lady fortune tossed down for them as their neighbours.'”
In other words, they're like that because they live in a desert, and could never have been otherwise.
And then there's the part where Omar, our Cassarabian POV character – who was so obnoxiously arrogant that I spent the whole book wishing him dead – has his entire motivation based around the love of Shadisa, a childhood friend who started hating him (funnily enough) when he physically stopped her from helping another woman escape from an unwanted marriage, whose ultimate punishment, when caught, was to be turned into an edible cactus for the use of passing travellers while possibly still retaining her human sentience. No, seriously: THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENS. And even when Shadisa tells him, over and over to his face, that she hates him now, Omar's only thoughts are for how he saved her from getting caught, too, and how she should really be grateful, and how beautiful she is, and how she's his and he'll save her and they'll be together forever, and how she can't really mean it when she says she doesn't want him, SOMEONE ELSE MUST BE CONTROLLING HER. And how Shadisa then goes on to join the evil cult and turn herself into a man, which Omar thinks of as an abomination, only she still likes him enough that, despite having tried to kill him several times, she also fails to inject him with the womb-giving serum, which he then takes as proof positive that she loved him after all. WHAT?
Or how about where the only other relevant female character, Maya Westwick, starts out as being described as the half-Jackelian, half-Cassarabian daughter of an escaped producer-slave, with her hatred of what was done to her mother as her motivation for everything she does, only it turns out that this is actually a lie, and she's a double-agent for the Cassarabian secret police (though whether willingly or through magically engineered conditioning that make her loyal to the caliph isn't clear – possibly it's both) and apparently doesn't hate womb mages after all? And how, when the sect who rose up in their hatred of how the womb mages mistreat women capture Maya, they threaten to have their womb mages make clones of her? And how it's inferred at the end that actually, the true caliph has been a lady all along?
Yeah. About that.
Jack Cloudie has drained me in so many ways. It's left me feeling wrung-out and sad and furious and betrayed, because the only thing worse than reading a hideously offensive book is reading a hideously offensive book by an author you thought was better than that. I'll always have those first four novels, but if a new one comes out? I don't know. I just don't know.
December 4, 2013
Great world building, sympathetic characters, nonstop action, and airships. What's not to love?
August 29, 2022
BLUF: While I really enjoy the Jackelian series, this was far below the typical quality.
The writing was just too . . . Flat? Thin? I'm struggling to come up with an appropriate descriptor, but it really read as though Hunt knew the story he wanted to tell but just slapped it down in a hurry-- very disappointing compared to the previous entries.
The saving grace is that Hunt is open about how each entry in the series is a different sub-genre (e.g. Secrets of the Fire Sea is mystery, From the Deep of the Dark is horror), so this one was plausibly written as a swashbuckler which just . . . isn't my top interest, I guess.
My biggest complaint is that there were a bunch of twists and reveals, but each reveal was performed by one character simply telling other characters how they'd figured something out using information the reader didn't have. There isn't much point or fun to a twist that the reader can't try to figure out ahead of time.
As a sidenote, the choice of villains-- once their full nature is revealed-- may be really off-putting to some in 2022. And, although I don't take offense at it, it was a little odd that of all the "good guys" only one had even a passing thought about the validity of the villains' concern about a truly horrendous practice imposed on them.
Anyway, I still want a prequel giving us some of Jared Black's time in the Royalist navy, so I'll keep reading.
The writing was just too . . . Flat? Thin? I'm struggling to come up with an appropriate descriptor, but it really read as though Hunt knew the story he wanted to tell but just slapped it down in a hurry-- very disappointing compared to the previous entries.
The saving grace is that Hunt is open about how each entry in the series is a different sub-genre (e.g. Secrets of the Fire Sea is mystery, From the Deep of the Dark is horror), so this one was plausibly written as a swashbuckler which just . . . isn't my top interest, I guess.
My biggest complaint is that there were a bunch of twists and reveals, but each reveal was performed by one character simply telling other characters how they'd figured something out using information the reader didn't have. There isn't much point or fun to a twist that the reader can't try to figure out ahead of time.
As a sidenote, the choice of villains-- once their full nature is revealed-- may be really off-putting to some in 2022. And, although I don't take offense at it, it was a little odd that of all the "good guys" only one had even a passing thought about the validity of the villains' concern about a truly horrendous practice imposed on them.
Anyway, I still want a prequel giving us some of Jared Black's time in the Royalist navy, so I'll keep reading.
May 26, 2020
Physical read. I read this for the Full Spoilers bookclub/podcast with my friend. We opted to have one book where we go to a bargain bin at the warehouse and choose a book that seems cool, is cheap and they have at least 2 copies of. Video review will be here from middle of June.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7XR...
This is set in a steampunk Victorian inspired fantasy world. The Navy has airships, the crew called Jack Cloudies. We follow a young, poor thief called Jack who’s caught and sentenced to death, he’s saved at the last moment by being recruited into the Navy. On the other side of the world we follow Omar who is a slave recently freed and recruited into basically the Kings Royal Guard.
Omar was a god awful character, not in the sense of evil but just a foolish, arrogant, unlikable and boring. Jack was a lot better but still not all that great. I didn’t enjoy the writing style, it was just bad, really bad. The overarching story of the nations going to war was not well thought out and very ‘meh’.
The only thing I thought was actually cool was the magic system which is all about manipulating nature and merging it with other things. Like a human who travels the desert gets a camel hump to store water.
From the reviews, a lot of people say the author’s other books are a lot better. I don’t know if I can be bothered though.
2/10 - So bad I don't know why I put so much effort into writing this review. - Sorry.
See this and other reviews + my own average stories at https://keithwarrenwriter.com
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7XR...
This is set in a steampunk Victorian inspired fantasy world. The Navy has airships, the crew called Jack Cloudies. We follow a young, poor thief called Jack who’s caught and sentenced to death, he’s saved at the last moment by being recruited into the Navy. On the other side of the world we follow Omar who is a slave recently freed and recruited into basically the Kings Royal Guard.
Omar was a god awful character, not in the sense of evil but just a foolish, arrogant, unlikable and boring. Jack was a lot better but still not all that great. I didn’t enjoy the writing style, it was just bad, really bad. The overarching story of the nations going to war was not well thought out and very ‘meh’.
The only thing I thought was actually cool was the magic system which is all about manipulating nature and merging it with other things. Like a human who travels the desert gets a camel hump to store water.
From the reviews, a lot of people say the author’s other books are a lot better. I don’t know if I can be bothered though.
2/10 - So bad I don't know why I put so much effort into writing this review. - Sorry.
See this and other reviews + my own average stories at https://keithwarrenwriter.com
November 29, 2024
I love this series, but this one didn't blow me away. There were definitely cool ideas in it, but it didn't seem as epic as the others. The new characters weren't as interesting as some of those in the prior books and some of the characterization elements got kind of repetitive. The last half was better than the first. Still worth a read.
January 2, 2018
Excellent as always
As fun and exciting to read as all his other books. Great characters and enough twists to keep you on your toes. I look forward to the next instalment.
As fun and exciting to read as all his other books. Great characters and enough twists to keep you on your toes. I look forward to the next instalment.
January 16, 2019
An entertaining and gripping read. I do like a well-done evil grand vizier.
May 14, 2021
Great creative ideas
December 16, 2022
One of the best from a wonderful series. If you like steampunk, you'll love Hunt's Jackelian series.
May 1, 2023
Another Commodore Black adventure. This time against the Cassabarian Empire and following a young Jackelian cardsharp and Cassabarian water farmer.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 29, 2023
I'm glad I borrowed this book instead of wasting money on it. Other people have said it better than me as to why, but that is the silver lining I'm taking away from this experience.
February 7, 2025
I love this world he has created. So much history that it feels vibrant and a real place.!
March 21, 2017
I enjoyed this book. I was not familiar with the series but I don't think it made much difference. One thing that was annoying was how the author kept switching plot lines so frequently. Sometimes he could write two pages on one plot line before switching to the other.
April 4, 2014
The story begins with Jack Keats, a penniless youth forced to live on the streets as a pickpocket as he struggles each day to keep survive and keep young brothers alive. After a bank robbery attempt by him and his group of outcasts goes horribly wrong, Jack is accused of leading the break-in (which he does not do) and is sentenced to join the Royal Aerostatical Navy, a military group that pilots a fleet of futuristic airships used for war. What I found both intriguing and somewhat annoying was the introduction of another main character, Omar Barir, a slave who lives on the other side of the world as Jack. Since they are supposed to be sworn enemies to each other, I found it fascinating reading from the third person perspective of both sides, which helped enhance my understanding of the complex world both characters lived in (Personally, I found it kind of hard to understand the setting and time of the book, but it was probably because I started this series 4 books in). The similarities that the opposing nations shared were evident through the double perspective, something I found worth noting.
Yet, having 2 main characters to switch back and forth from was irritating. Like almost all of the novels that I have read with multiple perspectives, it was hard to become fully immersed in the airship action that made up the latter part of the book because every time something exciting happened, Stephen Hunt would just change perspectives, and all the suspense that built up to that point would disappear – a trend I found a bit too common in this book. Furthermore, for those people who (like me) didn’t read the predecessors to Jack Cloudie, the setting of was hard to follow; I found myself reading pages and then either not understanding what I just read, rereading the page multiple times, or struggling with a combination of the two.
However, I feel like I would be doing the book justice if I just stated the negative qualities about the book. Although I found the book hard to follow, I did end up enjoying what I was able to comprehend nonetheless. The characters were somewhat cliché, yet the plot was unique (in its own disturbing way) -- once I got a hang of what I was reading, I found myself glued to the book, continually reading (or at least attempting to) for long periods of time. With every change in perspective, there was another plot twist, another starting development that had me turning the pages without end. Jack Cloudie wasn’t the best book I’ve read, not by a long shot, but I do believe that anyone who’s read the previous books should give this one a try.
Yet, having 2 main characters to switch back and forth from was irritating. Like almost all of the novels that I have read with multiple perspectives, it was hard to become fully immersed in the airship action that made up the latter part of the book because every time something exciting happened, Stephen Hunt would just change perspectives, and all the suspense that built up to that point would disappear – a trend I found a bit too common in this book. Furthermore, for those people who (like me) didn’t read the predecessors to Jack Cloudie, the setting of was hard to follow; I found myself reading pages and then either not understanding what I just read, rereading the page multiple times, or struggling with a combination of the two.
However, I feel like I would be doing the book justice if I just stated the negative qualities about the book. Although I found the book hard to follow, I did end up enjoying what I was able to comprehend nonetheless. The characters were somewhat cliché, yet the plot was unique (in its own disturbing way) -- once I got a hang of what I was reading, I found myself glued to the book, continually reading (or at least attempting to) for long periods of time. With every change in perspective, there was another plot twist, another starting development that had me turning the pages without end. Jack Cloudie wasn’t the best book I’ve read, not by a long shot, but I do believe that anyone who’s read the previous books should give this one a try.
August 18, 2022
Wow, fifth book in a series I had really enjoyed up to now, and this one sucked. It started off fine - I actually enjoyed it at the beginning - but then it went south in a hurry. With so much to dislike about this book where to begin? Let's start with the Islamophobia.
Whenever I read a book like this that sets part of the story in a culture that seems to be a thinly-veiled version of the Arab world, I get a little leery. Is it an attack, or is it just the setting that the author wants to work with? This is even more obvious than most - I mean the "evil empire" is called CassARABIA. Hunt has nothing good to say about Cassarabia - they own slaves, they use women as "producers" - basically, wombs to create monstrous creations to serve the empire. We have seen in the past that Jackelian society leaves lot to be desired, but there seems to be nothing redeeming in Cassarabia according to Hunt.
The whole role of gender in this book is problematic.
Whenever I read a book like this that sets part of the story in a culture that seems to be a thinly-veiled version of the Arab world, I get a little leery. Is it an attack, or is it just the setting that the author wants to work with? This is even more obvious than most - I mean the "evil empire" is called CassARABIA. Hunt has nothing good to say about Cassarabia - they own slaves, they use women as "producers" - basically, wombs to create monstrous creations to serve the empire. We have seen in the past that Jackelian society leaves lot to be desired, but there seems to be nothing redeeming in Cassarabia according to Hunt.
The whole role of gender in this book is problematic.
October 3, 2013
It's nearly impossible to review this book without spoilers, so I won't even try.
If you know me and my tastes in books, you know how much I love Stephen Hunt's stuff. That said, this is probably his most mundane book yet. While the womb mages make sense in the setting, they aren't quite as crazy awesome as I was hoping. Imagination and anticipation are rarely met halfway by the reality of execution, I suppose. So while I liked them, they weren't half as exotic as I'd been expecting.
I'm getting tired of Jared Black, too. The man whines and whines and then gets all badass *while* he whines, and then goes back to whining. He's just not a fun character anymore. I haven't liked him since Iron Moon (where the tragedy seemed a bit undersold and doesn't seem to have affected him at all). Still, he's a point of continuity, along with an extremely brief appearance by Coppertracks.
But the meat of this plot is the real kicker. It could easily be seen as misogynist given the pretense and final resolution with nary a female in the role of protagonist and with the female-centric faction soundly defeated. But that would miss the greater message buried in the narrative, one about oppression and the lengths people will go to in order to free and avenge themselves, how war is never black and white, and how so much of what seems to drive our identities is based on outright lies or misunderstandings perpetuated over generations.
This is a book that can be taken at face value and is a fun, exotic fantasy. But if you are willing to give the rollercoaster a chance to be more than just a thrill ride, it runs past some themes that can seed themselves for future thought as a bonus feature.
If you know me and my tastes in books, you know how much I love Stephen Hunt's stuff. That said, this is probably his most mundane book yet. While the womb mages make sense in the setting, they aren't quite as crazy awesome as I was hoping. Imagination and anticipation are rarely met halfway by the reality of execution, I suppose. So while I liked them, they weren't half as exotic as I'd been expecting.
I'm getting tired of Jared Black, too. The man whines and whines and then gets all badass *while* he whines, and then goes back to whining. He's just not a fun character anymore. I haven't liked him since Iron Moon (where the tragedy seemed a bit undersold and doesn't seem to have affected him at all). Still, he's a point of continuity, along with an extremely brief appearance by Coppertracks.
But the meat of this plot is the real kicker. It could easily be seen as misogynist given the pretense and final resolution with nary a female in the role of protagonist and with the female-centric faction soundly defeated. But that would miss the greater message buried in the narrative, one about oppression and the lengths people will go to in order to free and avenge themselves, how war is never black and white, and how so much of what seems to drive our identities is based on outright lies or misunderstandings perpetuated over generations.
This is a book that can be taken at face value and is a fun, exotic fantasy. But if you are willing to give the rollercoaster a chance to be more than just a thrill ride, it runs past some themes that can seed themselves for future thought as a bonus feature.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 5, 2013
Stephen Hunter has a series set in a strange world with air-ships, steam driven computers powerful enough to a achieve intelligence in the form of metal men. There’s also powerful genetic engineering. Each book in the series shares only a secondary character so they can be read independently. Jack Cloudie (hard from Tor) is a young man’s adventure full of excitment and near death experiences. Oman is a slave working in a desalination plant in the hot Cassarabian Empire, not knowing he is the secret son of the owner. But a sect of womb-mages is pushing the empire towards war with the Kingdom of Jackels because they have discovered how to make artificial lifting gas. Omar’s father is killed and he is somehow tapped to Guardian training instead of being resold or killed. Jack Keats came from a fallen rich family and now has is father and brothers in the poor house. A hacker, he is part of a plan to crack a major safe, but is caught and assigned to the Iron Partridge, the only armored airship in the royal navy. Even though designed to be completely automated, the machinery never worked so it is a perfect ship to send on a suicide mission to find the source of the Carabian lifting gas. Both end up in a hidden city filled with monstrous womb mage creations to rescue a man in an Iron Mask. The is a tale of heart pounding excitement and over-the-top danger that never stops for a second. Review printed in the Philadelphia Weekly Press
December 12, 2013
Book 5 of the Jackelian series.
Jack Keats is an orphan, living on the streets, his younger brothers struggling in the workhouse because if their father's gambling debts. But a robbery gone wrong leads to a narrow escape of execution, into the Royal Aerostatical Navy, which is heading to war with Cassarabia, so he might end up dead anyway.
Omar ibn Barir is a slave of a water merchant, but when his master is declared heretic, the whole sect is killed, Omar narrowly escaping. He's pressed into service in the Caliph's military. But he will have to cope with the sect that replaced and killed his.
Omar and Jack are on opposite sides of a war, both quite against their will. But there are forces beyond their control pushing for this war on both sides of the border. In Cassarabia, the new sect is gaining power, and hiding a secret about the new gas they have developed to float their air ships in the war. It's going to take both of them, and all of their allies, to uncover this secret and find peace, if peace is even possible.
Another fascinating peek into a world where technology and flesh-twisting magic mix uneasily, with sky ships and sky pirates, frightening diseases, and sentient steam-powered robots. A few characters from previous books reappear, as well as the new ones. Watching the parallel struggles of poverty stricken young men shows how we're all similar, even as we're different, and you can't help rooting for them to better their lives.
Jack Keats is an orphan, living on the streets, his younger brothers struggling in the workhouse because if their father's gambling debts. But a robbery gone wrong leads to a narrow escape of execution, into the Royal Aerostatical Navy, which is heading to war with Cassarabia, so he might end up dead anyway.
Omar ibn Barir is a slave of a water merchant, but when his master is declared heretic, the whole sect is killed, Omar narrowly escaping. He's pressed into service in the Caliph's military. But he will have to cope with the sect that replaced and killed his.
Omar and Jack are on opposite sides of a war, both quite against their will. But there are forces beyond their control pushing for this war on both sides of the border. In Cassarabia, the new sect is gaining power, and hiding a secret about the new gas they have developed to float their air ships in the war. It's going to take both of them, and all of their allies, to uncover this secret and find peace, if peace is even possible.
Another fascinating peek into a world where technology and flesh-twisting magic mix uneasily, with sky ships and sky pirates, frightening diseases, and sentient steam-powered robots. A few characters from previous books reappear, as well as the new ones. Watching the parallel struggles of poverty stricken young men shows how we're all similar, even as we're different, and you can't help rooting for them to better their lives.
March 11, 2012
Three things annoyed me about this book. The first, which the editor really should have caught, is that Hunt consistently writes "chord" when he means "cord". (There are a few other incorrect homonyms as well, but that one occurs repeatedly.)
The second is that he seems to think that when writing steampunk it's necessary to throw in the words "crystal", "clockwork", "steam" and "punch cards" more or less at random, even when they make no particular technological sense.
The third is the treatment of female characters. There's only one woman who seems like a real person, and she's a stone killer and completely unsympathetic. (The love interest of Omar, one of the two protagonists, not seeming like a real person turned out to be part of the point and may well have been deliberate, or the author may just not do fleshed-out, interesting, sympathetic female characters. It's hard to tell.)
Don't read this with your feminist glasses on. It's very much a Boys' Own Paper world, and there's a Big Reveal late in the piece that is, let's say, kind of misogynistic in the way it works out.
With those gripes out of the way, I did enjoy this on its own terms. Lots of airship battles, politics and genetic engineering, with hints at a lost technological past. If you can overlook the flaws I've mentioned it's a reasonable bit of steampunk.
The second is that he seems to think that when writing steampunk it's necessary to throw in the words "crystal", "clockwork", "steam" and "punch cards" more or less at random, even when they make no particular technological sense.
The third is the treatment of female characters. There's only one woman who seems like a real person, and she's a stone killer and completely unsympathetic. (The love interest of Omar, one of the two protagonists, not seeming like a real person turned out to be part of the point and may well have been deliberate, or the author may just not do fleshed-out, interesting, sympathetic female characters. It's hard to tell.)
Don't read this with your feminist glasses on. It's very much a Boys' Own Paper world, and there's a Big Reveal late in the piece that is, let's say, kind of misogynistic in the way it works out.
With those gripes out of the way, I did enjoy this on its own terms. Lots of airship battles, politics and genetic engineering, with hints at a lost technological past. If you can overlook the flaws I've mentioned it's a reasonable bit of steampunk.
September 28, 2011
This is the fifth book in Stephen Hunt's Jackelian series (named after country from which many of the protagonists in the series hail; it's obviously an analogue to 18th-19th Century Britain). I've read and enjoyed the previous four volumes and I really liked this one as well. One of the things I really appreciate is that while the books share a setting and occasional characters, they're all very different in terms of the stories they're telling -- sometimes more like an H. Rider Haggard adventure and sometimes like H.G. Wells. Jack Cloudie has a bit of a C.S. Forester feel to it -- much of it takes place on one of the airships of the Jackelian Aerostatical Fleet sent on a mission into hostile lands. Fast-paced, adventure-filled and featuring a caliph guarded by genetically-engineered shark-men; I'm not sure what else I could've asked for.
April 9, 2012
It seems that the odd numbered novels (except for #1 which I liked but #2 and #4 were still better) in the series are misses for me; I cannot pinpoint why this one did not work that well, but some of the elements were the lack of female main leads, the stereotype Cassarabian setting, the domination of pulp elements and overall a complete lack of interest in what happened. No real sense of wonder or of mystery like in Waves or Fire Sea (those two are still huge favorites and among the best sff of today), just a tired by the number story that had a "filler" quality
As it happens I got volume 6 and it hooked me on the spot so I expect I will read it soon rather than in the five pages at a time manner that I've read this one since i bought it on publication last year and which i finished only because I really wanted to get to #6 but also dot the i's and cross the t's so to speak...
As it happens I got volume 6 and it hooked me on the spot so I expect I will read it soon rather than in the five pages at a time manner that I've read this one since i bought it on publication last year and which i finished only because I really wanted to get to #6 but also dot the i's and cross the t's so to speak...
April 7, 2021
I liked it...first time I've read steampunk fiction...found the concept fascinating...that of a strange union of 2 worlds, one a pseudo Victorian type world (Jackelian) and a 1,001 Arabian Nights world (Cassarabia). The book involves a plot about 2 main characters centered around an airship called the Iron Partridge. One world relies upon scientific mechanics and the other relies upon genetical manipulation. The plot itself revolves around an evil vizier with a hidden background and that in itself is interesting...however I still remain more interested in the idea of these 2 different cultures, there is an element of Treasure Island mixed into the whole story...which is adds to the read. Overall I really liked the style and I must admit to looking forward to more of the style.
January 3, 2012
I made it, according to my e-reader, 80% of the way through this book when I simply gave up. I just didn't care about the characters to care what happened to them. (Sadly, I think I have a pretty good guess what happened to them anyway).
One of the biggest challenges with trying to care about the characters is that they were all just so terribly dull and stereotypical to the point that they could have been copied from "A Beginners Guide to "Tropes." Even the dialogue was stereotypical for the characters.
This is the book that made me swear steampunk was done, done, done. Luckily, I read an (earlier published) book that reminded what is good about steampunk. Whew.
One of the biggest challenges with trying to care about the characters is that they were all just so terribly dull and stereotypical to the point that they could have been copied from "A Beginners Guide to "Tropes." Even the dialogue was stereotypical for the characters.
This is the book that made me swear steampunk was done, done, done. Luckily, I read an (earlier published) book that reminded what is good about steampunk. Whew.
November 22, 2013
In the latest installment of the Jackellian series, Hunt finally presents the inner workings of Cassarabia and its womb magic. That is the best part of the book, seeing the inner workings of what before was only an enemy.
We have also two converging story threads, a certain character that appears in all the Jackelian books, and the aerostatical navy.
However, despite all this, the formula is starting to get old, even with the small details of Victorian tales, such as a Mr. Hyde reference.
It is not a bad tale on itself, but it is a bit limited at this point in the series.
We have also two converging story threads, a certain character that appears in all the Jackelian books, and the aerostatical navy.
However, despite all this, the formula is starting to get old, even with the small details of Victorian tales, such as a Mr. Hyde reference.
It is not a bad tale on itself, but it is a bit limited at this point in the series.
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