Author Profile · Fantasy & Science Fiction
Stephen Hunt
b. 1966 · British
Who is Stephen Hunt?
A writer with two parallel claims on the genre's gratitude: the fiction, and the infrastructure. On the infrastructure side, Hunt founded SFcrowsnest in 1991 — one of the very first online genre magazines, predating most of the web's furniture — and has kept it running across every iteration of the internet since. On the fiction side, his Jackelian sequence, opening with The Court of the Air (2007), arrived at the head of the steampunk revival: six-and-more volumes of the Kingdom of Jackals, steammen knights, worldsingers and pressure-cooker class politics, sold into more than a dozen languages. The Sliding Void space operas, the flintlock-epic Far-Called trilogy and later comic SF show a restless professional working every bench in the workshop. He has also served his time in the day-job trenches of web publishing and marketing, which may explain the magazine's longevity.
Why they matter
A significant figure in the steampunk and gaslamp revival — the Jackelian books were among the movement's defining commercial successes — and, through SFcrowsnest, one of online genre journalism's genuine pioneers: few people have both written the field and built its plumbing.
Essential books — and where to start
The Court of the Air
2007 · The Jackelian Series, book 1 · Fantasy · Steampunk, Gaslamp Fantasy, Epic Fantasy
Two orphans, one kingdom-sized pressure vessel: Molly Templar, workhouse girl with something in her blood that draws assassins, and Oliver Brooks, registered-dangerous ward of the worldsinger order, flee in parallel through the Kingdom of Jackals — a gaslamp nation of pneumatic towers, steammen knights with their own gods, exiled revolutionaries and the all-seeing aerostat intelligence service of the title. Beneath the chase plot, Hunt packs in Chartist politics, Aztec-flavoured elder horrors and a positive Dickensian relish for institutional cruelty, at a pace that rarely pauses to refuel. The furniture is brass; the engine is pure pulp adventure, run hot.
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves
2008 · The Jackelian Series, book 2 · Fantasy · Steampunk, Gaslamp Fantasy, Epic Fantasy
Professor Amelia Harsh, disgraced archaeologist with a pugilist's instincts, has spent her career being laughed at over Camlantis — the legendary city of pacifist utopians said to have risen into the sky rather than fight. Offered proof and funding by the man who ruined her, she leads an expedition by submarine up the jungle-choked Shedarkshe with a crew of convict labour and the slave-freed steamman Ironflanks, pursued by forces for whom a working utopia is the most dangerous artefact of all. Hunt's second Jackelian novel is his homage to the lost-world adventure — Haggard plumbing with Jackelian politics — and for many readers the series' high-water mark.
Sliding Void
2011 · Sliding Void, book 1 · Science Fiction · Space Opera, Comic SF
Captain Lana Fiveworlds runs the Gravity Rose — a tramp freighter several refits past respectable — on the margins of an interstellar economy designed by and for people richer than her crew: a skedaddling ship's engineer of dubious species loyalty, an AI with opinions, and the latest acquisition, a young Welsh-flavoured barbarian rescued from a feudal ice-world who turns out to carry more plot than cargo. Hunt plays the venerable free-trader formula — Firefly's lineage by way of the Stainless Steel Rat — with cheerful velocity and a salting of class politics, in a novella-sized opening designed to hook the series quickly.
In Dark Service
2014 · The Far-Called Sequence, book 1 · Fantasy · Epic Fantasy, Steampunk, Heroic Fantasy
Pellas is a world too vast to circumnavigate in a lifetime — nations stacked beyond nations, and the far-called the name for those who never come home. When slavers raze the town of Northhaven and carry off his son Carter, pastor Jacob Carnehan removes his collar and reveals the considerably less forgiving man underneath, setting out across continents of sky-mines, mercenary legions and imperial politics to take his family back. Hunt opens his Gollancz trilogy in full flintlock-and-airship mode: parallel father-and-son ordeals, a supporting cast with buried pasts of their own, and a frontier-justice engine running under the epic machinery.
Series
b. 1949 · American
Among the most awarded novelists in the field's history and the writer who proved space opera could be character-driven comedy of manners without losing its nerve.
b. 1947 · American
The first major post-Tolkien fantasist to weaponise the form against its own escapism: Covenant's anti-heroism opened the door through which grimdark, Abercrombie and every morally impossible protagonist since walked.
b. 1948 · American
The defining fantasist of the twenty-first century so far: ASOIAF normalised moral consequence and political realism in epic fantasy, created the grimdark mainstream, and via HBO made the genre a global mass medium.
