Rise of the Iron Moon
Near-unkillable beasts march on Jackals — the kingdom's last hope is a strange girl and an escaped slave.
About this book
The new moon was not there yesterday. Now it is, and the things coming down from it are taking nations one at a time. Jackals has weeks. The only person who can build the counter-weapon is a successful novelist who does not yet know what she is.
Molly Templar, hero of The Court of the Air, is now a celebrated author of celestial-fiction romances and politely allergic to her own publicist. Her quiet life ends when a refugee from the front arrives with a problem that is going to swallow the continent. Quatérshift has fallen. Other nations are following. Jackals is next — and the only architect of resistance the world has is hiding in her writing room.
Purity Drake, a young woman of the constrained Royalist line, has her own problem: she is more important than anyone has told her. Commodore Black is dragged into a uniform he does not want. The Steammen Free State is asked for everything it has.
This is the cycle's apocalyptic register and its biggest canvas — and Hunt at his most propulsive: a long retreat through the kingdom, a race for the weapon, and a confrontation that ends a war without pretending the cost was painless.
It is the cycle's most consequential book. The shape of the Kingdom of Jackals after Book 3 is structurally different from the shape of it before. Several recurring figures are changed permanently, and the cosmology of the series is deepened.
- you want fantasy that is not afraid of apocalyptic scale;
- you liked H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds and Burroughs's planetary romances;
- you want a war novel inside a fantasy frame.