Stephen Hunt is a British author. He was born in Canada in the sixties and studied in the United Kingdom. He worked for a time managing the online services of a number of newspapers and journals, until he broke into writing in the 90's.
His first works were short stories published in science fiction magazines. One of his stories, Hollow Duelists, won the 1992 Proto-Stellar magazine prize for best short fiction story. Two years later he published his first book, For the Crown and the Dragon. The book was instrumental in the creation of the fantasy Sub-Genre called Flintlock Fantasy, a cousin of steampunk that draws on themes and depictions of Napoleon and Georgian era aesthetics.
His second book, The Court of the Air, sparked the Jackelian Series, a fantasy steampunk world with Hunt's unique flintlock aesthetic. Other books in the series are The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, The Rise of the Iron Moon, Secrets of the Fire Sea, Jack Cloudie and From the Deep of the Dark.
Other series written by him are the Sliding Void Sequence and the Far-called Sequence. Hunt also runs the fansite SF Crowsnest, which can be found here.
Tropes featured in his works
- 10-Minute Retirement: Jared Black. He just never gets to settle down even though he really wants to.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: Used to manipulate machines in The Court of the Air
- Death Seeker: Boxiron has shades of this at times.
- Empathic Weapon: Several. Notably in the Court of the Air, a legendary Steaman weapon is shown to be sentient, and it seems that the others are as well.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: An England where the English Civil War resulted in a crushing of the king and the church is avowedly disbelieving in any gods; a France where The French Revolution went on and on and many more.
- Gambit Pileup: The Secrets of the Fire Sea turns out to be based on one
- King in the Mountain: Invoked in an allusion
- Mechanical Lifeforms: The Steammen were apparently created in the distant distant past as robotic servants, but are now fully sentient living beings, and have their own free state and government.
- Powder Keg Crowd: The king is displayed for abuse to disarm it.
- Royal Blood: A very bad thing to have in the parliamentarian Kingdom of Jackals; royals are deliberately bred and kept around to be abused and vilified.
- Transflormation: A rather grim form serves as a food source in The Court of the Air.
- Unable to Support a Wife: Jethro, after ejection from the Circlist church.
- Utopia Justifies the Means: a lot of major villains start out this way, but go careening off the slippery slope towards the end. It doesn't help that their ideas of utopia are often different from others peoples.
