The Stroke of Lightning

March 3, 2019March 4, 2019 / Rick Ellrod / 7 Comments

Love at First Sight

In French it’s “le coup de foudre,” “the stroke of lightning.” Love at first sight—if we’re going to be talking about it so much, let’s call it LAFS for short (an especially good term if we’re doing romantic comedy)—is one of the most ancient, familiar, and infamous romance tropes. But contemporary genre romance has its own spin on the matter.

There are, of course, innumerable songs that memorialize this phenomenon, from the classic “Some Enchanted Evening” (from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific)—“you may see a stranger, across a crowded room”—to a more recent Colbie Caillat song, Brighter Than the Sun, which actually uses the phrase “lightning strikes the heart.” Or simply consider the title of “It Only Takes a Moment,” which originated in Hello Dolly (1964) and was used to poignant effect in WALL-E (2008).

Shakespeare goes so far as to say “Who ever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight?” (As You Like It, III.5.81), an homage to Christopher Marlowe, who’d said it before in his 1598 poem Hero and Leander (according to Wikipedia). I need not mention Romeo and Juliet.

Aside from romance strictly speaking, LAFS can be useful in an adventure story, by way of what TV Tropes calls The Dulcinea Effect: “the compulsion many male heroes have to champion, quest for, or die for girls they met five minutes ago.” This can be contrasted with, or may lead to, a romance “forged in fire”—the notion that a couple may bond through having an adventure together. I’m fond of this one myself, perhaps applied with one spin or another.

For the moment, let’s note that the instant-love convention is fun, but often seems implausible, not to mention clichéd. One can see LAFS simply as a dramatic convention, like the Shakespearean soliloquy—but perhaps that’s not all there is to it.

Lust at First Sight

The contemporary romance, more preoccupied with eros.

In modern genre romances, a great deal more emphasis is placed on physical desire than was the case in earlier tales. As a result, LAFS takes a slightly different form.

In a “Some Enchanted Evening” or Romeo and Juliet scenario, the lovers’ beguilement may be almost spiritual, a sort of epiphany. They are attracted to each other’s beauty, but there may be an element of reverence mixed in. In the contemporary romance, on the other hand, the first impression is decidedly physical. Once the main characters meet, they can hardly keep their hands off each other.

This sort of LAFS is both more plausible and less substantial than the more general sort. It’s plausible because physical desirability can be evident at first sight. It can be intensified by further acquaintance—getting to know the voice, actions, words, varied aspects of the beloved. But the sexual attraction, at least, can be immediate. This is traditionally true for males, but contemporary romance makes it abundantly clear that in at least some cases women react the same way. Examples are so omnipresent as to make it unnecessary to cite them.

To do these stories justice, they recognize that insta-lust isn’t enough. The main characters typically take an entire novel’s worth of events to really fall in love. Lust (or, less tendentiously, sexual desire) is just the initial driver. There’s a lot of “getting to know you” to be done before the story is over. And a good deal of that usually happens through meeting obstacles or countervailing forces that need to be overcome.

Tension and Obstacle

If the romantic leads fall in love immediately, there have to be obstacles that prevent them from getting together at once. Otherwise, the story will be very short. I believe it’s from an entertaining opus entitled Writing a Romance Novel for Dummies that I recall the sage advice: “If your story is ‘they came, they saw, they dated,’ then you don’t have a story yet.” With intense attraction pulling the lovers together, they’ll collapse into each other at once unless there’s also something to push them apart.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t precisely true. One could simply depict a couple gradually growing more interested in each other. At first the romantic interest is just somebody they know or meet. Then a greater interest awakens, attraction strengthens, and they reach that obsessive fascination that marks the “falling in love” stage. This type of relationship might be the most common and realistic of all. But it’s the hardest to manage for an author: it requires depicting a whole series of attitudes developing at just the right pace.

I would love to see such a story. But it would be much subtler and more gradual than the tempestuous narratives audiences tend to prefer. Your average handbook on fiction writing will dwell at length on the importance of conflict in holding a reader’s interest—and for good reason.

The obstacles that keep the lovers apart, then, may be external or internal. The simplest external problem is physical separation. In John C. Wright’s “Count to the Eschaton” series (it begins with Count to a Trillion, 2011), the star-crossed lovers connect in volume one. However, the female lead, Rania, must embark on a slower-than-light interstellar voyage that will last twelve thousand years. She will survive due to time dilation. But it’s a good thing her earthbound partner, Menelaus Illation Montrose (there’s a name for you!), has ways of prolonging his life over the intervening millennia. In the meantime, their relationship is on hold.

A more conventional separation can be seen in tales from the Age of Sail, when sea travel around the world might take years—shorter than millennia, but long enough in a human life. Captain Jack Aubrey, for example, the perennial hero of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, frequently spends months at a time apart from his beloved Sophie.

External obstacles may also include dangers that keep the characters otherwise occupied—from immediate peril in an action-adventure story to blackmail or other threats—as well as social or cultural barriers like those faced by Romeo and Juliet.

In a less action-oriented tale, the obstacles are more character-based or internal. The love affair may be interrupted by disputes (You’ve Got Mail), misunderstandings, antipathy for one reason or another (Pride and Prejudice), or by one or the other person’s inner character issues, such as previous bad experiences or trust issues (where the Big Lie often plays a role). External and internal problems can be combined in romantic thrillers like Don’t Look Down (Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer, 2007).

In each case, the characters’ initial attraction, the LAFS moment, keeps pulling them together in spite of the difficulties, ad astra per aspera. They just can’t resist each other, no matter what plausible reasons might be given for trying. The combination of opposing drives creates the fruitful tension that keeps the reader’s interest.

It’s worth noting that Andrew Greeley counterposes desire in a similar way to the more mundane obstacles of daily life. In White Smoke (1996), Blackie Ryan, a frequent Greeley spokesperson character, observes: “human sexuality is distinct from the sex of other primates in that it is for bonding as well as for procreation. The bond between husband and wife stretches like a rubber band. . . . Then, when it is at the breaking point, the force of passionate love draws them together again.” This is a constant theme in Greeley’s novels. In other words, lust or desire isn’t just for beginnings, for LAFS. It continues to play a vital role throughout a love affair and into marriage.

But I digress.

Retrospective Love

One of my brothers once asked the other two of us whether we believed in LAFS. The three of us ultimately came to the same conclusion. You can fall for someone at first sight, yes; but you won’t know if it’s love until much later.

The instant attraction is a good starting point. But it can’t ripen into love unless the participants come to know more about each other’s personality, character, interests, and so on. We have to see someone in a variety of circumstances: what they’re like with family, friends, enemies; when they’re mad, happy, sleepy; over the long run. (The plausibility of the “forged in fire” adventure-romance is that strenuous situations reveal more about someone’s character than more ordinary casual interactions.) As an old Orleans song puts it, “love takes time.”

Later on, when the couple has grown closer enough to know that they really do love each other, they can look back at their first meeting and say, that was when we began to fall in love. And they won’t be wrong. Chances are they felt that initial attraction right then, and now they know that was the beginning of a love story.

But that couldn’t have been predicted from the moment of LAFS. Some such moments sputter out: they prove to be mere temporary infatuation, or the admired individual turns out to be unavailable (already married, for instance), or on getting to know them better they find that they aren’t as good a fit as they thought. We can’t know, from the initial thunderbolt alone, that it’s going to lead to a true love story.

So we can fall in love at first sight; but we can only say that retrospectively, after the fact.

This points up an important difference between stories and real life. If we’re reading a story—particularly a genre romance—we can generally be confident that LAFS will lead to a deeper relationship between the characters. We predict that not from LAFS itself, but from genre and narrative expectations. This isn’t always borne out: some tales will start by introducing a romantic interest who doesn’t turn out to be The One, later to be displaced by the real article. Jane Austen’s Emma is a brilliant example of this twist: among other comic errors, the heroine thinks she’s in love with Frank Churchill, but it takes the entire novel for her to realize that it’s her longtime friend George Knightley that she really loves. But as a rule, if the heroine is devastated by the attractions of someone in Chapter the First, that’s who she will end up with in Chapter the Last.

In real life, we have no such guarantee. Life is a story, but it’s not always constructed according to our narrative rules—at least in the short run. We cannot know in advance whether the object of desire who’s just swum into our ken is really our destiny.

Conclusion

As the famous sage Wikipedia observes, LAFS fits in neatly with the notion, put forth as far back as Plato, that the beloved is our “other half,” the one who makes us complete—what we might call the theory of complementarity. In Plato’s dialogue, Aristophanes suggests that meeting our other half leads directly to an intoxicating attachment to the other person.

Would that it were so simple. If our whole selves were evident at first glance—if our appearance fully expressed our selves—that might work: who you really are would be “written all over your face.” But in fact a given moment or aspect expresses something about who we are, but not everything. Even in the best case, we can’t possibly absorb everything about a person at first sight—which may be a good thing, as it allows us some privacy and reserve. In worse cases, though, the other may deliberately deceive us or conceal things that would compromise our love. That’s why love takes time.

Lois McMaster Bujold once said, “The question a romance plot must pose, and answer (showing one’s work!) is not ‘Do these two people get together?’ but rather ‘Can I trust you?’ Which is most certainly not a trivial problem, in art or in life.” The answer to that question we can only learn by extensive experience—though perhaps that experience can be compressed to some degree by experiences that show our true natures in condensed fashion (the “forged in fire” trope). Only at length can we really know love at first sight.

The Great American Read

September 16, 2018 / Rick Ellrod / Leave a comment

PBS is conducting a poll asking about our favorite novels in connection with a TV mini-series, “The Great American Read.” Through October 17, we can vote each day for one or more of 100 candidates. I haven’t watched the TV shows—but the poll alone is fascinating.

In my area, Fairfax County Public Libraries is running its own variant. They’ve broken down the 100 books and series into brackets, like a tournament. We vote on a series of pairs—which of the two we prefer—and the candidates get whittled gradually down to a climactic final round. They’re about halfway through at the moment.

The Best and the Best-Loved

Looking at somebody else’s “Top Ten” (or Top 100, or generally Top N) list is always interesting. We may be talking about books, classic rock songs, movie heroes and villains, or almost anything: the most common reaction, I suspect, is when we look at some of the entries and ask ourselves, how could that possibly have gotten on the list? Or, conversely, how could they ever have left out this?

Obviously a list of the “twelve tallest buildings” or “five longest rivers” is going to be relatively uncontroversial. But when there’s no quantitative measure that can be applied, the lists are bound to have a subjective element. Reading them stimulates us to ask—what could were the listmakers have been thinking when they made those choices?

With the Great American Read (“TGAR”), the subjective side is even more emphasized, because the list (and the poll) is about “America’s 100 best-loved novels,” not the best novels. The criteria aren’t the same. There are books we respect, but don’t like. My favorite piece of music, as it happens, isn’t what I would judge the greatest piece of music. A more personal appeal is involved.

Someone for Everyone

It’s clear that PBS was at pains to include something for everyone. The books cover a wide range of genres. The list includes plenty of “classics”—the ones we got assigned in high school—and also a lot of popular volumes that couldn’t be considered classics by any stretch of the imagination. (I suspect there are no high-school reading curricula that include Fifty Shades of Grey.)

In other words, we’ve got our “guilty pleasures” right alongside acknowledged masterpieces. I always enjoy the way alphabetical listings produce similarly odd bedfellows: on my bookshelf, Jane Austen rubs shoulders with Isaac Asimov, while Tolkien is bracketed by James Thurber and A.E. van Vogt.

Almost any reader should find something to vote for in the TGAR collection. If you don’t like Tom Sawyer, how about Alice in Wonderland? Not enthused about The Godfather—try The Pilgrim’s Progress? If you’re not in the mood for 1984, maybe you’ll find Anne of Green Gables more congenial.

By the same token, I’m guessing almost no one would accept every book on the list as a favorite. If there’s someone whose personal top ten list includes The Handmaid’s Tale, Atlas Shrugged, and The Chronicles of Narnia, I’d like to meet them.

The F&SF Division

In my own sandbox, the science fiction and fantasy field, the listmakers came up with an interesting cross-section. I was a little surprised to see Asimov’s Foundation series on the list: it’s great stuff, and an SF classic, but I’d have thought it was “inside baseball,” widely known only among card-carrying fans. Another classic, Frank Herbert’s Dune, is probably more widely read. (I notice the entry for Dune is not marked as a series, which is a good thing. While there are quite a few follow-on Dune books, after the original the quality drops off exponentially.)

Other SF picks are more contemporary. We’ve got The Martian, which I’ve mentioned before, and Ready Player One, which was just made into a movie this year—both good choices (by my lights), though not yet perhaps seasoned enough to be classics like the Asimov and Herbert entries.

We’ve got the comedic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the classic Frankenstein, the satirical Sirens of Titan, the young adult Hunger Games, SF horror in Jurassic Park, dystopian tales in both 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale. We have what you might call prehistorical fiction, The Clan of the Cave Bear, which I’d class as a variety of SF, and time-travel romance in Outlander (also recently come to video). A Dean Koontz novel, Watchers, which I’d never heard of, may represent the SF thriller. Then there’s Atlas Shrugged, which probably belongs in SF given a technological premise, although these days it’s more often thought of as a political tract.

Of course it’s always possible to regret the omissions—Heinlein or Brin or Bujold, for example—but a list of 100 nationwide favorites in all genres is never going to be able to pick up every quality work. Since the TGAR candidates were largely chosen by a random survey of 7200 Americans, it’s easy to see why more widely-read examples are favored, whether or not they represent the highest quality. The focus on American readers also introduces some selection bias, which might account for omitting, say, Arthur C. Clarke.

Over in fantasy, the “high fantasy” epic is well represented by The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, and A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones), with the children’s division held down by the Narnia tales and Harry Potter. Again, there are some familiar subgenres: satire (Gulliver’s Travels), whimsy or children’s books (Alice, The Little Prince), horror (The Stand), young adult (Twilight).

I was a little surprised to see three entries in what one might call the Christian fantasy column: The Shack, Left Behind, and something called Mind Invaders. When an item turns up that you’ve never heard of, it’s a useful reminder of how far-ranging people’s tastes really are.

An Author’s Range

The list can also spark some interesting reflections on the range of a prolific author. Probably most people would pick Dune as Frank Herbert’s leading entry, and Pride and Prejudice as the most well-loved of Austen’s several great novels. But the only candidate for Dickens on the list, for example, is Great Expectations.

Now, I’m fond of Dickens, but Great Expectations isn’t one of the stories I particularly like. Yet it does seem to come up frequently whenever Dickens is mentioned. (I don’t even hear quite as much about A Tale of Two Cities, which we did read in high school—possibly chosen for school because it’s relatively short; assigning a class one of Dickens’ doorstoppers would have consumed an entire semester’s worth of reading time.) Is Expectations really representative of Dickens’ best? I’d have picked Little Dorrit or Our Mutual Friend, say, if I’d been in on the original survey. Or David Copperfield, maybe, as the most accessible to a modern reader. But, again, the list suggests there’s a reservoir of interest in Expectations that I just don’t happen to share—a broadening thought.

In a similar way, it may be harder to come up with the most representative Stephen King or Mark Twain novel—there are so many of them. (The listmakers did confine themselves deliberately to one entry per author, which makes sense.) Even within a single author’s oeuvre, it’s intriguing to see which work a majority of readers picked as outstanding.

Incommensurable Goods

After enough of this kind of reflection, we may find ourselves with a certain skepticism about the whole comparison process.

The Fairfax County bracket system, entertaining as it is, only strengthens this impression. There is a sorting algorithm to create a ranking by going down the list and placing each item in turn in relation to those above it. And it’s fun to weigh random pairs of works against each other, even within the particular classifications the libraries used (Classics, Midcentury, Late Century, Contemporary).

But the match-up process yields some odd results. (I understand sports tournament designers also have to take care to ensure good playoffs.) There’s some plausibility in a face-off between Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights. But what should we make of pitting Anne of Green Gables against War and Peace? The Great Gatsby against Alice? In some cases the entries hardly seem to be in the same weight class, so to speak. It strikes me as a no-brainer to match The Lord of the Rings against Where the Red Fern Grows, a novel I’ve never heard of.

Even within a given author’s work, one can wonder about how conclusive a comparison actually is. There’s a scale factor that makes some matches clear: Asimov’s sweeping Foundation series seems a more logical “top” candidate than even an excellent short story like “The Last Question” or “Robbie,” just because of its greater scope and size. But it can be hard to decide between stories on the same scale—two great short stories, say, or two very different novels.

At this point I’m reminded of an argument made by philosopher John Finnis in his Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980). Noting that one of the classic objections against utilitarianism (“the greatest good for the greatest number”) is the inability in practice to reduce all possible good and bad things to a uniform measure of “utility,” Finnis takes the position that there are a number of categories of human goods that can’t be reduced to each other. His list of such goods includes life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, friendship, practical reasonableness, and religion (ch. IV.2, pp. 86-90). These goods aren’t interchangeable. They are literally “incommensurable”—they can’t be measured against each other.

It’s possible that some similar principle of incommensurability applies to the books we’ve been discussing. Would I want to give up, say, Pride and Prejudice in favor of The Lord of the Rings, or vice versa? They’re unique achievements, and we realize something quite different from reading each of them. We might be able to create some rather vague order of precedence—for example, by the traditional question of what one book you’d want to have with you if marooned on a desert island. But that’s not the same sort of comparison as equating a dollar with ten dimes.

On the other hand, the fun of weighing (note the measurement analogy) one story against another suggests there’s some common element, or elements, in our enjoyment of a good book. If nothing else, such match-ups can get some entertaining discussions going.

Comfort Reading

December 4, 2016May 28, 2017 / Rick Ellrod / 12 Comments

Reading for Reassurance

You’ve heard of “comfort food,” right?

In Robert A. Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast (1980), one character asks the others: “Write down the twenty stories you have enjoyed most. . . . Make them stories you reread for pleasure when you are too tired to tackle a new book.” (ch. 33, p. 349)

I’d never actually thought about it before I read that passage, but there is such a category. There are times, especially toward the end of the day, when we want to immerse ourselves in a story, but not an arduous story. Even if we’re currently reading something new that we like, we may not feel we can fully appreciate it when we’re tired out. We’d rather relax into something less demanding.

The same can be true when we’re feeling emotionally drained. Sometimes we pine for what we might call “comfort reading” on the analogy of “comfort food.”

We might be tempted to regard this urge for the familiar and reassuring as craven or self-indulgent. But there’s nothing wrong with giving way to that impulse—some of the time. We can welcome a new book as a challenge; but we don’t always have to be challenged. Sometimes we simply need to recoup our energies for a while.

This is true in general, I think, but especially at Christmastime—so today seemed like a good time to bring up the subject.

Good Comfort Reading

What kind of stories one likes for “cocooning” will vary, culturally and individually—as the Wikipedia article cited above makes clear for comfort food. In TV Tropes terms, “your mileage may vary.” By way of example, here’s some of what I find myself looking for.

When I relax, I want something relatively light, not a matter of life and death. A fan of adventure fiction spends a lot of time embroiled in saving the world, or the galaxy—or at least the imperiled main characters. And a lot of science fiction deals with world-changing issues and problems. That’s pretty strenuous. It’s nice to be able follow a narrative where the stakes are not quite so high.

At the same time, there has to be enough substance to engage our interest. A story in which nothing is at stake won’t hold our attention. So pure farce or silliness doesn’t always fill the bill.

And for me, at least, it helps if the story is fairly “warm-hearted.” Happy endings, sympathetic characters, a certain degree of kindness and encouragement in the air. A cynic might have a quite different preference here: a happy ending may not be congenial to his world-view. But we sentimentalists want some of the milk of human kindness in our chicken soup. (Well, maybe not literally.)

For this reason, romances make good hunting grounds for comfort reading. Not necessarily genre romances; I’m put in mind of Chesterton’s Tales of the Long Bow, which is almost uncategorizable (social comedy? political commentary? science fiction?) but incorporates no fewer than seven separate romances in a scant 217 pages, possibly a world’s record.

In a good love story, something that matters very much is at issue—but generally only for the main characters. This is why P.G. Wodehouse’s comedies are almost always romantic comedies. His amiable main characters are never in very great danger, but rooting for their love affairs keeps us focused through the plot’s succession of hilarious absurdities.

Personally, I also like children’s stories to relax with. There’s a category of what I call “family adventures,” where preadolescent children get into a series of scrapes or difficulties that are interesting but never too serious. Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy Quartet (starting with The Saturdays, 1941) is my paradigm example. Some of E. Nesbit’s books, such as Five Children and It, have a similar air, but with a fantasy component. (I’d cite Eleanor Estes and Edward Eager as well, but that would raise the mysterious question of why so many writers in this category have the initials E.E. Same reason Superman’s girlfriends all have the initials L.L., I suppose.)

Christmastide Reading

Of all the times of the year, the Christmas season may be when one most wants to be reading something engaging but pleasant. There are probably people who want to stage a “Game of Thrones” marathon on Christmas Day, but I’m not one of them.

There are of course the traditional comforting stories that are specifically about Christmas. A Christmas Carol is one obvious choice (though the actual book is a bit spookier and more tough-minded than some of the adaptations)

Less obvious favorites of mine include “A good-humoured Christmas chapter” from Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers (ch. 28); “How Lovely Are Thy Branches” from Diane Duane’s Interim Errantry; chapter 5 of The Wind in the Willows (“Dulce Domum”); Madeleine L’Engle’s Dance in the Desert and The Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas; Elizabeth Scarborough’s Carol for Another Christmas; chapters 12-13 of Kate Seredy’s The Good Master; and Manly Wade Wellman’s “On the Hills and Everywhere,” in the collection John the Balladeer. The only trouble is that some of these are quite short; they’ll barely last you through lunch.

But even at Yuletide, we may not want to marinate in Christmas quite to that extent. So I also cultivate a selection of books that strike (or encourage) the right mood, but don’t have anything specific to do with Christmas. I’ve mentioned Wodehouse; Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances have a similar combination of light-heartedness and warm-heartedness (I’ve often thought of her as Wodehouse crossed with Jane Austen). Other kindly and entertaining tales not specifically about the season include Lois McMaster Bujold’s A Civil Campaign—one of my all-time favorites for all seasons—Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog, and Diane Duane’s Omnitopia Dawn.

Have any favorites of your own for Christmastime, or comfort reading generally?

Arabella of Mars

September 12, 2016 / Rick Ellrod / 1 Comment

Arabella of Mars, by David D. Levine (New York: Tor, 2016), may be described as a Regency steampunk planetary romance. Better yet may be the flyleaf testimonial from Madeleine Robins: “If Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne, and Patrick O’Brian had sat down together to compose a tale to amuse Jane Austen, the result might be Arabella of Mars.”

Genres are getting complicated these days. But sometimes that cross-fertilization produces some entertaining mixes.

Our young heroine’s British family maintains a plantation on Mars, as if it were the Caribbean islands or India at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The native Martians, filling the role of the local population, are considered primitive by the British colonists. In this respect the setup is faintly reminiscent of the Martian sequence in Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast.

Physically, however, Levine’s Martians are more reminiscent of the green Martians of Burroughs’ Barsoom: large, nonhuman, living in a desert world. In keeping with modern sensibilities, the “natives” actually possess a respectable culture and can be formidable opponents. This accounts for the “planetary romance” aspect—“an extension of late 19th and early 20th century adventure novels and pulp romances to a planetary setting,” as Wikipedia describes the genre.

When tomboyish Arabella is removed with her mother and sister to Earth, the Austen angle takes over. Arabella finds the Regency-era dinner parties and promenades boring; she’d rather be tinkering with mechanical piano-players and other automata. The swiftly thickening plot, which involves period devices like entailed estates, forces our heroine to disguise herself as a boy and take a menial position on an East India, er, Mars Company vessel bound for Mars again.

At this point the Burroughs and O’Brian factors collide in an extraordinarily droll description of the Age of Space as an Age of Sail. Captain Jack Aubrey would have been perfectly at home on the quarterdeck of this interplanetary ship crewed by rough sailors and featuring three masts, not in a row, but protruding from the top and sides of the boat at 120-degree angles. The Diana is lifted by hot-air balloons (coal-fired, of course) into the extremely high-speed interplanetary air currents, which make travel to Mars a matter of a few months. These vessels are reminiscent of Burroughs’ Barsoomian airships, bringing us back to the planetary romance theme.

Levine gives us with a straight face his depiction of a Solar System filled with breathable air, without deigning to worry about trivialities such as how the planets could maintain their orbits in such a resisting medium. The absurdity of the premise simply makes the description more delightful. As we deal with pirates on the (very) high seas, stop at a convenient asteroid to cut down trees for repairs, and make charcoal to fuel the balloons for the perilous descent to Mars, one can only ride along enjoying Levine’s inventive adaptation of one set of tropes into an entirely different world.

But it’s not just silliness. The book isn’t a farce. There’s a good sound story with believable characters strung through this cockeyed worldbuilding. There’s even a real romance, in the love-story sense, though this plays a somewhat muted role. Overall, the tale has more of the sea story than of the Regency romance about it. But it might serve an aficionado of either genre as a cordial introduction to the other.

The novel is billed as “Book One” of “The Adventures of Arabella Ashby.” One can only imagine what sort of eccentric scenarios might come next. (For example, I don’t believe anything has yet been mentioned about Venus—which is bound to be a jungle world, perhaps with dinosaurs, if it’s based on the Burroughs-Heinlein model.) I look forward to seeing where this whimsical tale may lead.

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