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1[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/hunts_jackelianseries.jpg]]
2
3The ''Jackelian Series'' is a series of ScienceFantasy novels written by English author Creator/StephenHunt. The series is comprised of ''Literature/TheCourtOfTheAir'', ''The Kingdom Beyond the Waves'', ''The Rise of the Iron Moon'', ''Secrets of the Fire Sea'', ''Jack Cloudie'', ''From the Deep of the Dark'', and ''Mission to Mightadore''. All the novels are set in the same universe, but with a rotating cast of characters in each book.
4
5The novels are mostly set in and around the Kingdom of Jackals, a steampunk Kingdom with shades of Victorian Britain and Gilded-Age America. An economic and military powerhouse, Jackals is beset on all sides by enemies within and without. To protect Jackals, the founders of the Jackelian Parliament created the Court of the Air, an elite spy organization so secret that few who hear of it actually believe it exists. Despite their best efforts, threats to Jackals and even the world loom large.
6----
7!!Tropes:
8
9* AbusivePrecursors:
10** In ''The Rise of the Iron Moon'', [[spoiler:the leaders of the AlienInvasion aren't aliens at all: they're an ancient, nigh-omnipotent race of ''humans'' who'd left Jackals' Earth a barren waste, invaded another planet, and are now coming ''back'' to ravage their now-recovered homeworld because they've used ''that'' one up too]].
11** The subterranean Chimecan Empire that ruled Jackels' continent during the Ice Age exploited the scattered surface peoples as slave labor, sacrifices, and a food source.
12* TheAce: Business tycoon, aeronautical designer, and [[spoiler:UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans OmnicidalManiac]] Abraham Quest.
13%%* AdventurerArchaeologist: Amelia Harsh
14* AlienSea: The Fire Sea is a region of ocean underlain by intense volcanic activity, dominated by submarine-cooking Boils and fast-growing mutant corals that thrive on heat.
15* AllOfThem: Used word-for-word by a witness to how many lashlites are mustering to attack Camlantis.
16* AmazonBrigade: The Catosian City States have all women armies. The Pericurian mercenaries hired to defend Hermetica City's boundaries are mostly female also.
17* AnachronismStew: Aside from the Steampunk elements, Jackelian history gives us the likes of the Black-Oil Horde (think "Mongols driving Mad Max-style war vehicles") and suits of old Royalist plate armor with gas mask filters in the helmets. Had Tzlayloc prevailed in book one, he'd intended to rig up ''steam-driven obsidian knives'' for industrial-scale HumanSacrifice.
18* AnnoyingArrows: It takes a ''lot'' of crossbow bolts to bring Henry Tempest down.
19* BearsAreBadNews: Especially when they're immense, vicious, and alarmingly-crafty ursks, which roam in packs rather than alone like regular bears.
20* BellyMouth: Old Three-Eye the ''Killasaurus max'' has a '''huge''' one in her torso.
21* BerserkButton: Literal example: Boxiron's "top gear" turns him from a clumsy, lurching hulk to a nigh-unstoppable whirlwind of brutal destruction. Which can be a problem, as when he "fights in five", the lever that shifts him ''out'' of top gear tends to get stuck there...
22* BestHerToBedHer: Catosian warrior-women adhere to this trope, which causes some trouble aboard ''Sprite of the Lake'' when one of the sub's crew gets his nose broken in response to making a pass at one. Commodore Black opts to "court" Veryann by trying to beat her at chess: a much safer option.
23* BetterToDieThanBeKilled: The hapless Jagonese "exiled" by the insane First Speaker opt to throw themselves ''and their children'' into Hermetica City's electrified defensive wall rather than be mauled by the approaching ursks.
24* BioAugmentation: This trope is practically Cassarabia's Hat, used by desert nomads to adapt their bodies to survive sandstorms and lack of water, and by the judicial system to equip convicts for punishment labor, e.g. giving extra arms to someone condemned to be a slave porter.
25* BizarreAlienSenses: The slats have no eyes and operate by echolocation and smell. Craynarbians have sensory hairs on the backs of their necks which stiffen in the presence of lurking predators, although just ''what'' they're detecting isn't defined.
26* BloodBath: Prince Doublemetal lounges in a bath of ''oil'' that the siltempters share among themselves.
27* BlueBlood: Jackals breeds its royalty like animals. The most blue blooded gets their arms amputated and displayed as a figurehead "king" or "queen" which the citizens of Jackals can abuse.
28* BookEnds: ''The Kingdom Beyond The Waves'' both starts and ends with one of its dual protagonists giving their faithful companion an unothodox-to-Jackelians funeral appropriate to their culture: Amelia leaves her archaeological sidekick Mombiko to return to Nature where he lies, and Cornelius [[spoiler: has Damson Beeton serve up Septimoth's roasted carcass at a banquet]].
29* CallARabbitASmeerp: Played straight ''and'' played with. Some expressions are logical parallelism ("Carlist" for "Marxist", "atmospheric" for "pneumatic"), but others use phrases which have entirely different ''slang'' meanings than one might expect ("flash mob" = gangsters, "cardsharp" = punch-card computer programmer). Subverted with [[spoiler: Old Three-Eye the kilasaurus max: a term which ''sounds'' like she's a tyrannosaur under a Smeerpish name, right up until she starts bellowing ''words'' and is revealed to have a BellyMouth.]]
30* TheCallKnowsWhereYouLive: Poor Commodore Black gets dragged into every single story, willingly or not. By ''Deep of the Dark'', he's openly Lampshading how he keeps getting coerced into these messes.
31* CallingCard: Charlotte leaves cards with her art-thief alias "Sable Caracal" at the scenes of each robbery, to the delight of the Middlesteel press. Deconstructed in that she's ''not'' just doing so to be theatrical and/or to taunt the police, but to ensure that potential purchasers of the artwork she steals will know it's the '''Cat'''-gibbon they should speak to in order to make an offer for it.
32* ChildSoldiers: Jared Black leads a handful of pubescent Jagonese militia cadets against the Pericurian invasion. He has little choice, as the children they're defending are even younger.
33* CityOfCanals: Hermetica City on Jago. Unusual in that some of the canals are ''boiling'', Jago being geothermally active and its cities, a former refuge for human civilization during the Ice Age.
34* ClingyMacguffin: The pistols of Hood o'the Marsh, once taken up, will reappear in the possession of the current Hood even if dropped from an aerostat or flung into a furnace.
35* {{Clockpunk}}: Transaction engines, Catosian-made motorcars, and Fortune's prosthetic arm are all examples of the setting's sophisticated and widespread clockwork technology. Steam power ''does'' exist alongside it, but the overall feel is more this trope than pure {{Steampunk}}.
36%%* ColdBloodedTorture: Used to manipulate flesh-metallers in ''The Court of the Air''.%%What is?
37* TheComplainerIsAlwaysWrong: Dick Tull's suspicions are always off-target.
38* CoolAirship: The ''Iron Partridge'', once it [[spoiler: becomes self-aware]] and is able to operate as its designer intended.
39* CoolBoat: Commodore Black has skippered several Cool U-Boats in his day, although they tend to get destroyed a lot.
40* CouldntFindAPen: Jared Black duels and impales a villain near the first novel's ending, in the middle of a snowy field. The villain attempts to leave a DyingClue as to Black's true identity, but the snow on which he scrawls his bloody message melts away before anyone finds his body.
41* CrystalDragonJesus: The Circlist Church doesn't believe in gods, yet it ''does'' have parsons, archbishops, confessionals and sermons... they just confess to ''irrational'' thoughts, not sinful ones. The defunct Child of Light faith from pre-Commonshare Quatershift has Christian overtones. Cassarabia has some of the motifs of Crystal Dragon Islam, and the faith of the steammen has Crystal Dragon Vodou elements.
42* CrystalSpiresAndTogas: Camlantis had this reputation. [[spoiler: And apparently lived up to it for a good long time... at least, until their civil war.]]
43* CursedItem: The Joshua Egg from ''Fire Sea'' is a multi-layered mathematical puzzle that requires a computer to crack it. Decrypting a layer of the Egg reveals information that Hannah's party needs, but also has a tendency to destroy the calculating device - valve-based, {{Clockpunk}}, or whatever - that cracked it.
44* DeathSeeker: Boxiron has shades of this at times due to his Frankenstein's Monster-like history.
45* DreamingOfTimesGoneBy
46* DreamWalker: The Whisperer's mental powers allow him to visit Oliver in his dreams, and to snoop at the dreams of others.
47* EmpathicWeapon: Several. Notably in ''The Court of the Air'', a legendary Steamman weapon is shown to be sentient, and it seems that the others are as well.
48* ExactlyWhatIAimedAt: Omar defeats the villain of ''Jack Cloudie'' by throwing a knife, not at his opponent, but at the control lever of the gate to a corral of untamed draks. Released, the ferocious reptiles spare Omar, who smells like a drak-rider, but hungrily tear the villain to pieces.
49* ExpendableClone: The Eternal Caliph's reign is perpetuated by a combination of life-extension elixer and this trope. When his life-prolonging drug can no longer sustain him, he has seven clones of himself raised and educated in secrecy. The one who scores highest on a series of tests is implanted with his memories and becomes the new caliph; the other six are strangled.
50* ExplosiveLeash: The feybreed of the Special Guard are fitted with SlaveCollar torcs that can kill them if they go rogue or disobey orders.
51* FantasticDrug: Shine, an anabolic steroid used by Catosian warrior-women and by a Court agent in book one. Magnesium mixed into the coke that fuels their boiler-hearts can drug steammen reprobates into happy delirium.
52* FantasticRacism: The otherwise-moral steammen have no tolerance for dead or damaged steammen whose bodies have been "contaminated" by human-crafted or siltempter replacement parts. Such "desecrations" are shunned if they refuse to commit suicide as social pressure dictates. "Mutables" -- mu-bodies who achieve consciousness through repeated use, rather than being designed by King Steam -- aren't very welcomed either.
53* FantasyCounterpartCulture: An England where the UsefulNotes/EnglishCivilWar resulted in a crushing of the king and the church is avowedly disbelieving in any gods; a France where UsefulNotes/TheFrenchRevolution went on and on, and many more.
54* FetusTerrible: Womb mages in Cassarabia invoke this trope upon female slaves, as forced surrogates for their artificial life forms.
55* FictionalEarth: ''Possibly'' the case, as implied by a smattering of references to artifacts, lost cities, and age-old beliefs ... but if it ''is'' Earth, it's so far into the future that ''even long-vanished Camlantis'' only knew of our own era from sparse archaeological evidence. [[spoiler: ''Mission to Mightadore'' finally rips the veil off this issue, transporting the characters to an ''extremely'' distant past that is obviously a post-apocalyptic America.]]
56* FloatingContinent: When Camlantis returns to its home dimension it floats in the sky. Smaller-scale floating islets arise as a result of leyline discharges (floatquakes) that rip chunks of landscape out of the ground in (super)natural disasters.
57* FoodChainOfEvil: Inverted as a Food ''Symbiosis'' Of Evil for the Kal or human chattel devoured by the Army of Shadows: the Masters feed on the life force, then the vampiric Kal drain the blood, and finally the slats chow down on the flesh.
58* GambitPileup: ''The Secrets of the Fire Sea'' turns out to be based on one.
59* GenderBender: This trope is the key to the conspiracy at work in Cassarabia from ''Jack Cloudie''. [[spoiler: One of the primary antagonists turns out to be the woman Omar'd been in love with, transformed into a male and wholly recruited into the scheme to usurp power within the Caliphate.]]
60* GeneticMemory: Justified in Molly Templar, whose instinctive recognition of her ancestor's prior discoveries in the Chimecan ruins can be attributed to the nanites inherited in her 'system juices'. Amelia's ''deja vu'' regarding Camlantis isn't as explicitly explained, while Purity's flashbacks to Elizica's time are as much supernatural as InTheBlood.
61* GeniusLoci: Jackals itself, as manifested by the spirit of Elizica of the Jackeni.
62* GhostCity: Jago, once humanity's sole surface-world refuge from the coldtime, has been virtually deserted since the world warmed up again. Its last outpost beyond Hermetica City is being vacated at the beginning of ''Secrets of the Fire Sea'', and emigration has been forbidden in a desperate attempt to keep the city's infrastructure staffed. [[spoiler: By the novel's end, human/ursine warfare has left all of Jago uninhabited, save the ab-locks which ''might'' be regaining their intelligence.]]
63* GodzillaThreshold: Everyone treats the [[spoiler: Hexmachina]] as this.
64* GoingNative: An accusation leveled at the Observer and Septimoth for having spent too much time among humans.
65* GrewBeyondTheirProgramming: Mu-bodies - non-sentient drones manipulated by steamman slipthinkers - occasionally develop sentience spontaneously, [[spoiler: as does the ''Iron Partridge'']]. Coss Shaftcrank is one such "''mutable''".
66* HealingFactor: Slats have a weak variant of this, as their blood clots so quickly that anything less than a penetrating wound to a vital organ isn't going to keep them down for long.
67* HenchmenRace: Slats are this for the Army of Shadows, while two different variants of shark/man biologicks serve this purpose in Cassarabia.
68* HiveMind: The greenmesh of Liongeli.
69* HumanSacrifice: Chimecan civilization was centered around the sacrifice of sentients to the dark Wildcaotyl gods. The siltempters sacrifice [[spoiler: Gabriel]] to get the human blood needed to call upon their evil patron Steamo Loa.
70* HumanSubspecies: Craynarbians and graspers are offshoots of humanity, adapted for survival in (respectively) the HungryJungle of Liongeli and underground caverns that offered shelter from an ice age. Gill-necks are an ocean-adapted variant that pre-dated the Ice Age by thousands of years. Ursines are obliquely implied to be related to humans, at least in being descended from primates.
71* InnocentAliens: The Kal are naturally inclined to this, which sadly left them almost defenseless against the Army of Shadows.
72* ItCanThink: When Old Three-Eye starts bellowing ''coherent words'' as she hunts Amelia's companions down. Also, when the bestial-seeming slats start using guns.
73%%* KingInTheMountain: Invoked in an allusion.
74* LivingGasbag: Skraypers are giant jellyfish-like floating beasts that lashlites hunt and aerostats must sometimes fight off.
75* LegacyCharacter: Hood o'the Marsh, a ProtoSuperhero-flavored persona passed from one secret vigilante to the next.
76* TheMagicGoesAway: The laws of (meta)physics are said to have changed since ancient times, with the Black-Oil Horde's petroleum-powered vehicles and gunpowder weapons being non-functional in the current era. Electricity, implied to have once been safely utilized, has become so unpredictable and dangerous -- on par with it being ''radioactive'' -- that only the terminally-reckless or the transaction-engine operators of Jago still risk being near it.
77%%* TheMagnificent
78* MakeMeWannaShout: Steammen knights have the ability to modulate their synthetic voices to a pitch and volume that can shatter glass, ceramic, bones, or even stone. They don't advertise that fact, preferring to reserve it as a surprise attack. In ''Iron Moon'' we meet Jenny Blow, a fey Bandit of the Marsh with similar powers who claims to have taught King Steam this technique.
79* MassSuperEmpoweringEvent: Happens whenever the feymist rises or drifts into populated territories. The luckier feybreed gain unique powers and are conscripted into the Special Guard; the unfortunate ones are deformed and/or maddened as well as empowered by exposure and get locked up in a maximum-security asylum.
80* MatryoshkaObject: The Joshua Egg from ''Fire Sea'' is a virtual example: a layered mathematical puzzle in which Hannah's mother encrypted a series of documents about the Conquests' research.
81* {{Mayincatec}}: The Chimecan Empire had distinct meso-american touches, most evidently in their Aztec like human sacrifices.
82* MeaningfulRename: When Slowcogs and Silver Onestack are left with no choice but to fuse themselves into one life-metal body, they adopt the name Slowstack.
83* MechanicalLifeforms: 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.
84* MilesGloriosus: Omar from ''Jack Cloudie'' can barely speak a word ''without'' bragging, although the narrative reveals how much of this conduct is a ruse and/or insecure self-justification.
85* MiniMecha: The protective Rigid Armor Motile suits worn by Guild turbine-workers in the geothermal energy plant under Jago.
86* MonsterProgenitor: In a non-evil example, King Steam is the forefather of all Free State steammen, and personally approves and programs every one of them (except the occasional "mutable"; see GrewBeyondTheirProgramming). It's not known where ''he'' came from, but he's definitely thousands of years old at least.
87%%* MonsterShapedMountain: The Great Face on Kaliban.
88* TheMorlocks: The ab-locks of Jago owe their name to this trope, [[spoiler: and are likewise the degenerate descendants of humans from a long-dead civilization. Ursks are also this trope, but applied to ursines rather than humans.]]
89* MorphWeapon: The knife left to Oliver by his father, a onetime secret agent, changes shape as Oliver wills it and endows the young man with the skill to wield it, whatever its form. Billy Snow's cane conceals another example of this trope. One of the Bandits of the Marsh wields a spear that collapses into a knuckle-duster.
90* MummiesAtTheDinnerTable: [[spoiler: Duncan]] keeps the skeletal remains of his daughter in a travel-case, and imagines she speaks to him. [[spoiler: His inability to face her death arises because it was ''his own artillery unit'' that killed the girl, unaware that the Cassarabian border-bandits they were shelling had already seized civilians from his home village.]]
91* MyBrainIsBig: The sea-bishops are called that because their heads have evolved a miter-like shape to house their enlarged brains.
92* NayTheist: The Circlist church advocates logic and reason, teaching that there are no divine powers ''worthy'' of worship, no matter what those so-called "gods" may have to say about it.
93* NewChildLeftBehind: [[spoiler: Purity Drake is the daughter of Jared Black, by way of this trope. Infiltrating the royal breeding house in his youth, he became involved with an interned female co-conspirator, but believed she'd died in the crossfire when his spy operation was exposed. Jared doesn't learn that his lover had survived being shot ''or'' that she was pregnant until Purity turns up on his doorstep, unaware they're related and motherless since the events of book 1.]]
94* NightmarishFactory: The transaction-engine facility on Jago is a safety-inspector's nightmare, saturated by mutation-inducing energies and full of constricting pipes, clanging mechanisms, scalding-hot steam, and savage, barely-tamed ab-locks toiling under human workers' inexpert control.
95* NoSuchAgency: The Court of the Air (the "wolftakers") are considered more UrbanLegend than reality by the common population of Jackals. The Court works hard to maintain this reputation.
96* OneManArmy: Henry Tempest, who plows his way through claw-guards like they're a pack of kittens.
97* PerfectPacifistPeople: Ancient Camlantis was like this for thousands of years. Amelia's search for its lost history is driven by her having grown up with her father's stories about it. [[spoiler: Subverted during Camlantis's last years, when fear of invasion drove some Camlanteans to engage in physical violence to stop the ''rest'' of them from unleashing a global-genocidal weapon.]]
98* PlanetLooters: The Army of Shadows in ''Iron Moon'' and the sea-bishops in ''Deep of the Dark''.
99* PowderKegCrowd: The king is displayed for abuse to disarm it.
100* PrincessInRags: Purity Drake is a royal kept in squalor by the Jackelian authorities.
101* RagtagBunchOfMisfits: A convicted bank robber, a crackpot steamman, an embittered secret policewoman, a botched SuperSoldier, a manic-depressive commander, a crew of convicts and border tribesmen, Jared Black (of course), and an experimental tortoise of an airship that malfunctions in mid-battle? Sounds about right to save Jackals from Cassarabia's new air fleet....
102* ReducedToRatburgers: How the Whisperer avoided having to subsist on the drugged gruel at Hawklam Asylum, which would otherwise have suppressed his mental powers.
103* RememberTheNewGuy:
104** Hannah from ''Fire Sea'' is introduced as the daughter of Amelia's companion who'd died early in ''Beyond the Waves''. There's no hint in the former that he'd had a family, not even when Amelia receives his dying words.
105** In ''Red Moon'', the existence of the "Kal carnivores" comes as a complete shock to the Earthly characters, who don't actually seem to have a word for "vampire". By ''Deep of the Dark'', the discovery of blood-drained victims with double marks on their necks ''immediately'' kicks off a flurry of vampire hunts and rumors, including ones that make it clear it's traditional Lugosi-style vampires the hunters are thinking of, ''not'' Kal carnivores.
106* RemoteBody: A small fraction of steammen are "slipthinkers", able to project their consciousness into expendable drones called "mu-bodies". King Steam and Aliquot Coppertracks each have this ability.
107* RobotReligion: The Steamo Loas, which sometimes possess or provide prophetic visions to their steamman worshipers.
108* RoboticTortureDevice: Different technology, but the cross-shaped stone platform Tzlayloc uses to torment Molly [[spoiler: and Prince Alpheus]] definitely qualifies.
109* RoyalBlood: A very bad thing to have in the parliamentarian Kingdom of Jackals; royals are deliberately bred and kept around to be abused and vilified.
110* SecretPolice: Jackals' Court of the Air and State Protection Board. Quatershift's Directorate Eight. Cassarabia's Pasdaran. Subverted by the Steamman Free State, said to be the only nation on the continent where this trope ''doesn't'' apply.
111* ShackleSeatTrap: Seats on board the Mass darkships can sprout entwining tendrils. These serve to restrain captives or to mentally link the vessel with its pilot.
112* SharkMan: The praetorian guard of the Caliph Eternal consists entirely of ogre-sized shark/human hybrids, cooked up by womb mages and programmed for absolute loyalty to the true Caliph. [[spoiler: Which is why the grand vizier tries to have them all dirt-gassed when he does away with the duplicate he's been manipulating.]]
113* SkyPirate: Armed airships are only allowed to be used by the RAN; any private citizen who tries to fly one is labeled a Science Pirate and an enemy of Jackals.
114* SuperSoldier: Captain of marines Henry Tempest was ''supposed'' to be one of these, but the experimental SuperSerum used to enlarge and strengthen him also made him dependent for survival on alternately dosing himself with two elixers: one that pumps up his aggression and one that tranquilizes him.
115* SuperpowerLottery: Exposure to feymist can bestow a bewildering range of powers upon those who survive it, ranging from familiar comic-book ones like SuperSpeed or teleportation to more esoteric ones like the Whisperer's dreamwalking and illusions or [[spoiler: Oliver's energy-nullification]].
116* SwissArmyAppendage: Cornelius Fortune's prosthetic arm, which contains enough gadgets to serve as a stand-in UtilityBelt when he's being Furnace-Breathed Nick.
117* TalkingWeapon: Lord Wireburn
118* TenMinuteRetirement: Jared Black. He just never gets to settle down even though he really wants to.
119* TerrorHero: Hood o'the Marsh. Furnace-Breathed Nick also.
120* ThirdEye: Lashlites have one that allows their seers to see into the future. Unusually, it's located on the back of the neck rather than the forehead.
121* ThisIsWhatTheBuildingWillLookLike: The First Senator of Jago proudly displays scale models of his preposterously over-ambitious designs for new cities, port facilities, and civic buildings to visitors. It's implied that his underlings have these models created purely to suck up to and humor their boss, as Jago lacks the resources, the prosperity, and even the population size to permit even a tiny fraction of its crackpot leader's architectural imaginings to ever come to pass.
122* TimeAbyss: The earliest prehistoric civilizations of Jackels' Earth to be referenced in the books date back ''at least'' five million years. Even its all-but-forgotten ancient cities were built on top of the fragmentary remnants of ''previous'' ancient cities.
123* TinyHeadedBehemoth: Old Three-Eye, a female ''Kilasaurus max'' as tall as a tower, has an incongruously-tiny lizard head at the end of her neck. The huge mincing-machine maw [[BellyMouth in her abdomen]] more than makes up for her conventional jaw's meager size.
124* TooImportantToWalk: The Baroness of the House of Ush. The Caliph Eternal of Cassarabia too. The Great Sage of Kaliban rides a self-hovering litter; justified because he's ''really really'' old.
125* TownWithADarkSecret: Wainsmouth, during the Army of Shadows' occupation of Jackels.
126* {{Transflormation}}: A rather [[HumanResources grim]] form served as the long-ago Chimecans' food source in ''The Court of the Air.'' Womb mages in Cassarabia use this as a punishment for crimes ranging from a girl fleeing an ArrangedMarriage to treachery; the latter is why the Caliph Eternal's decorative "orchard" has no actual trees in it, just this trope's victims.
127* TwoLinesNoWaiting: Each novel mainly focuses on two protagonists who are having separate, yet ultimately linked, adventures.
128* UnableToSupportAWife: Jethro, after ejection from the Circlist church. [[spoiler: Although the fact that he hears the abandoned gods of Jackals talking to him may have had more to do with his estrangement from Alice Gray than a loss of income.]]
129* UnwillingRoboticization: "Equalizing" in the first book.
130** Even ''steammen'' are occasionally subjected to this, when their original parts are replaced with, or scavenged and incorporated into, non-steamman automata which they consider a contamination.
131* UrsineAliens: Inhabitants of the nation of Pericur, they're actually ''called'' "ursines".
132* UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans: 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.
133** Commodore Black gives Oliver a heartfelt rant dismissing this trope's basic concept as the root of ''most'' of the world's evils.
134* {{Veganopia}}: The herbivorous Kals' civilization was a strong example, mostly because predators were virtually unknown in their world's ecosystem prior to the Masters' invasion. Too bad they were ''so'' peaceful that they were helpless to repel the Army of Shadows...
135* WeaponizedCar: Amelia finds an ancient weaponized ''horseless carriage'' in the Tomb of Deisela-Khan.
136* WellIntentionedExtremist: Abraham Quest sincerely cares about the plight of the world. [[spoiler: That's why he decides to put it out of it's misery and rebuild the world in his image.]]
137* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: Although some of the "equalized" survived the first book, none of the later novels mentions what became of them or whether their UnwillingRoboticization could be reversed.
138* TheWorfEffect: Happens to [[spoiler: the Court of the Air, the Catosian Free States]] ''and'' [[spoiler: the steamman army]] in ''Iron Moon'', to show how badly outclassed the local nations' defenses and technology are.
139* TheWorldIsAlwaysDoomed: It says a lot about the series that the ''least'' dire BigBad in the first three books only threatens the near-total annihilation of ''sentient'' life on Jackals' Earth.
140* WorldsStrongestMan: Or at least ''Jackals''' strongest, for Gabriel [=MacCabe=]. His strongman/boxer performances boast that he's the strongest human in the nation.
141* YouAreNumberSix: Steammen have two names, a common-use one and a secret numerical code known only to themselves and King Steam. The latter is spoken publicly only at their funeral. Slats have numbers instead of names, being short-lived MixAndMatchCritter weapons mass produced in vats.
142* YourTomcatIsPregnant: Unexpectedly done with [[spoiler: Lord Starhome, a ''spaceship''. To be fair, the steammen who'd salvaged her after the crash call one another "he" by default, and had no cause to suspect a fellow MechanicalLifeform could give birth.]]
143* ZeppelinsFromAnotherWorld: Jackals defends itself with the Royal Aeronautic Navy, or RAN. In ''Jack Cloudie'', Cassarabia threatens to overturn the balance of power by launching an airship-navy of its own.

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