The Diamond Throne
The Elenium demonstrated the Eddings machine ran just as well with older protagonists and darker church politics — and its weary knight-errant prefigured a generation of middle-aged fantasy leads.
Book Entry · Fantasy
In Dark Service
by Stephen Hunt · 2014 · The Far-Called Sequence, book 1
What is In Dark Service about?
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.
Why it matters
The opening of the Far-Called trilogy and Hunt's move to Gollancz: his shift from gaslamp whimsy toward darker, continent-spanning epic, demonstrating the post-Jackelian range.
Where does it sit in the series?
The world of Pellas, too vast to map, where sky-mines, slave raids and a stolen family pull the Carnehans across continents: flintlock-and-airship epic fantasy.
In the Guide from The Far-Called Sequence:
- In Dark Service (2014)
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