Nice cover, shame about the insides

I've been reading a lot lately in bursts of 20 minutes or so between doing baby stuff. Annoyingly, I haven't found any of these books THAT good and while I'd rather not bag novels people have put a lot of effort into unnecessarily, I can't keep quiet about Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt. It COULD have been really good but it just struck me as lazy and derivative.

Plotwise it echoed His Dark Materials by Philip Pullmanand China Mieville's Perdido Street Station and it borrowed a lot of pseudo-Victorian technologies from The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. More obscurely I thought the overly long climactic battle owed a lot to the ending of the Japanese horror movie Tetsuo II The Body Hammer.

It's even marketed as being similar to His Dark Materials. (The blurb also refer to Sussannah Clarke but any comparison is just silly.)

The man is clearly an SF fan - apparently he set up one of the first SF websites in 1994. But this book read like a pastiche of the best bits of recent successful fantasy novels: enagaging young heroine, check, interesting technology check, airships check, different species of people including some with exoskeletons check, artificial intelligence check and MAGIC check.

There's also a laziness of adopting details from the real world that bothers me a lot. For no apparent reason people who live in mountains have prayer flags and meditate just like Tibetans. Folk froim the "Uplands" speak brogue and play things like bagpipes. Heart-eating dark gods have names ending in "tl" just in like pre-columbian central America.

And I know I was tired but the last hundred or so pages really dragged for me.

None of this would be so bad of course if I hadn't paid full price for this book.