Where to Start with the Jackelian Books

The question is not, strictly speaking, difficult. Seven novels, published in order, adventurous in temperament, self-contained in structure. You could reasonably close this article, buy Book 1, and be reading airships-and-worldsingers by tea-time. Fifty thousand readers have done exactly that and nobody has complained.

But the question turns out to be more interesting than it looks, because Stephen Hunt has spent seven books writing the Jackelian sequence in a way that leaves two doors genuinely open. Not three; not five; two. The publication-order door, which is the sensible one. And a side door — a real, load-bearing side door, not a fire escape — which happens to be Book 2, and which several readers of long standing will tell you, without prompting and with a certain gleam in the eye, was actually the door they came in through.

We will take them one at a time.

Door one — The Court of the Air

The obvious answer. And it is obvious for very good reasons, so we may as well start there.

The Court of the Air was published in 2007 as Hunt’s first Jackelian novel. Everything the sequence is going to do, it does here for the first time, and it does it in a book that has been built — with visible engineering — to work as an on-ramp. Two protagonists: Molly Templar, a poorhouse girl in Middlesteel with a price on her head she has not been told about, and Oliver Brooks, a country boy under indefinite worldsinger registration on the suspicion that the leylines might have touched him. Neither of them has ever seen the Kingdom of Jackals from outside their own corner of it. Neither of them has any idea who is running the country. Neither of them will finish the book without a great deal of the machinery being pulled out where they can see it.

The reader learns the world the way they do: by getting into trouble in it.

This is the door for the reader who wants the sequence to teach itself. Everything you are going to meet in the other six books — the worldsingers and their theological approach to sorcery-as-injury; the Special Guard and its collar; the Steammen Free State and King Steam; the exiled Carlists and the Commonshare across the border; the celgas concession and the airships that run on it; the great slow tectonic something buried beneath the Kingdom that people politely refuse to think about — is either introduced in The Court of the Air or set up so cleanly by the end of it that the sequel writes itself into you. There are worse ways to begin a fantasy sequence than by having the ground beneath your feet named and inventoried while you are trying to survive a chase.

Also, purely as a chase novel, it moves. Hunt is very good at chases; the second half of The Court of the Air is a case study.

Choose this door if: you would rather start at the beginning and let a novel earn its worldbuild; you like Dickens crossed with Miéville crossed with a submarine; you have a long weekend and were planning to be sensible with it.

Door two — The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

The one everyone forgets to mention. It is Book 2, and it is a perfectly proper starting point.

The Kingdom Beyond the Waves is a big self-contained lost-civilisation adventure novel of the sort the field does not really produce any more. Professor Amelia Harsh — disgraced academic, celebrated brawler, last person in Jackals who still believes that the ancient floating city of Camlantis was real — accepts an offer from a reclusive industrialist to mount the expedition that will prove it. The expedition will go up the great jungle river Shedarkshe into Liongeli, whose deep interior belongs to an insect-collective civilisation called the daggish, and whose deep interior does not welcome guests. Her u-boat captain is Commodore Jared Black, being blackmailed into the job and loudly furious about it. He is also, incidentally, one of the finest single creations in modern flintlock fantasy, and this is the novel in which he takes command of the recurring cast.

The book works as a first Jackelian read for a specific reason. It assumes you know nothing about the world — because Amelia has been in academic exile, because Commodore Black is a foreigner in his own kingdom, because the expedition itself is a small self-contained polity with foreigners in it — and it reintroduces every idea the reader needs, cleanly, at speed, in service of the plot. There is not a moment in which The Kingdom Beyond the Waves stops for you to have read The Court of the Air first. It cannot afford to. It has a river to go up.

Choose this door if: you want one big pulp expedition novel with an archaeologist heroine, a Verne-adjacent submarine, and a lost city that ends up being about a great deal more than it is about; you enjoy H. Rider Haggard read at an entirely modern voltage; you like your worldbuild delivered by the character who has been alienated from the world, rather than the character who is being introduced to it; you would rather read a novel of genuine appetite than a novel of introduction.

You will circle back to The Court of the Air afterwards. Every reader who starts with Book 2 does. Book 1 loses nothing by being read second — the reveals it makes are still reveals, because Book 2 is respectful about not stepping on them — and it gains, if anything, from being encountered as back-story rather than as first-story. Some readers, having done it this way, will die on the hill that this is the correct order. We shall not join them on the hill, but we can see the case.

What about the others?

Briefly, because a field guide should never overstay its welcome:

Secrets of the Fire Sea (Book 4) is the honest third alternative and no reader who begins there has been badly served. It is the sequence’s locked-island detective novel, introducing Jethro Daunt and Boxiron — the finest double act in Hunt’s catalogue — and it is contained, atmospheric and self-explaining. It is a side entrance rather than a door, which is why it does not qualify here. But it exists, and if the phrase “flintlock fantasy detective story” makes you sit up straight, you will not regret going in that way.

The Rise of the Iron Moon (Book 3) is the sequence’s biggest and darkest novel and deserves the run-up. Do not start here.

Jack Cloudie (Book 5) and From the Deep of the Dark (Book 6) reward context. Do not start here.

Mission to Mightadore (Book 7) is a homecoming for existing readers. Very obviously do not start here.

And then?

Whichever door you take, the sensible move afterwards is publication order. The Jackelian novels are stand-alone in the sense that they resolve — no cliffhangers, no half-finished plots, no Empire Strikes Back twist without the next film — but they are cumulative in the sense that the world keeps deepening. A character introduced in Book 1 is furniture by Book 5. An organisation glimpsed at the edge of Book 2 is central to Book 6. Reading in order lets you ride that curve forward rather than reverse-engineer it, and reading in order is, in the end, most of the pleasure.

But whether you enter through the front door and take the tour, or slip through the side door in the company of an archaeologist, a foul-mouthed commodore and a u-boat with a temper, you will find yourself in the same country. And the country will still be there when you decide to see the rest of it.

Two doors. Both perfectly good. Mood decides.

Mind the airships on your way in.