Ashby and the eldest, only son Michael behind on Mars.Īrabella spends the several month voyage from Mars to Earth locked in her estate room to prevent her from doing anything rash. Idyllic times were not to last as at the age of 16 her mother insists that she and her two younger sisters return to their ancestral home of England in order to become proper English ladies, leaving Mr. Little did Arabella know how important those two things would be to the adventures that were to come.
Her Martian itkhalya (filling a similar role as a nanny) oversaw not only to Arabella’s well being but also her Martian education. With a keen mind she shares her father’s love of automata and delights in learning how they operate and maintaining the delicate inner clock-spring mechanisms that make them work. Our heroine, Arabella Ashby, was born and raised on Mars. In this universe Mars is populated and much like how the English in our history handled native peoples in the areas they claimed, the Martian natives have come to be servants in the homes and workers in the fields for the English. Travel between planets has similar dangers to sailing Earth’s seas with French privateers being a constant dread for Mars Company trading ships. Instead of the East India Company there is the Mars Company sailing under the English flag. Currently there is a colony on Mars and commerce between the two planets occurs at the stately pace of sailing ships traversing outer space. Starting in the year 1812, AoM imagines a Regency era in which Mars has previously been reached by intrepid explorer Captain Kidd through the discovery of currents that sail between Earth and Mars. A blurb on the back cover describes AoM as “…the delicious love child of Jane Austen, Patrick O’Brian, and Jules Verne!” and I’m not certain I could sum it up more perfectly except that someone else blurbed, “Regency space opera in its best form! An intrepid, intelligent heroine, wonderful characters, and a breathtaking conflict.
AoM was the perfect amount of escapism that was needed to balance the stress of this election cycle.ĪoM came to my attention through author Mary Robinette Kowal and my independent bookstore promoting it. Supposedly things happen for a reason and I’m now glad that “Arabella of Mars” came second because it was the book I was reading at the ending of this U.S. As I had been waiting for over a year to read “Ghost Talkers”, that was given higher reading priority. For my birthday in October my daughters gave me two books, “Ghost Talkers” and “Arabella of Mars”.
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