Arabella of Mars - Q2

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The ships of the book were sailing ships, not too dissimilar to the Napoleonic era sailing ships plowing the seas of earth, and quite a lot of attention was spent detailing how they worked. Did they interest you? Or were you bored by the exposition? The fact of the vacuum of space being entirely replaced by air would require some wonky physics, as the drag of bodies moving in air would eventually slow and stop therm from movement. Did that bother you at all, or were you able to accept it. at face value?

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    I thought it was a nice fancy - I strongly suspect that in physics terms it would be very hard to make work, but that didn't bother me here, and I just took it as described that this was in fact the case. I rather liked the transferral of earthly ocean phenomena into interplanetary ones, such as currents, turbulence that needed careful navigation but gave a kind of slingshot effect etc.

    (Mild spoiler) I went on to read the second one and the description of a space-based naval battle parallel to Trafalgar (with certain similar characters, ships, manoeuvres etc) was a lot of fun.

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    Let's do steampunk! Let's take some 18th century sailing stories, nerd-trope them with a couple of bits of planetary romance, and not think too hard about what any of this would mean. It's all about the surface bling, and almost nothing to do with coherent world-building. I mean, if Levine actually thought through some of the implications, he may have to have to come up with something novel and hence uncomfortable for readers!

    I'll be charitable to Levine: he's probably produced a finely-crafted commercial instrument that gives people exactly what they want, thus increasing his paycheque. But that doesn't mean I have to like the book.

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    I agree with Neil on the matter of setting, though I certainly don’t begrudge an author a paycheque and have nothing against people writing things others may want to read. But I totally agree it’s a paper thin setting that’s basically taking steampunk/airships and mashing together with Barsoom in the name of ‘originality’, which I put in quotes because I don’t believe this qualifies as original. But I thought the book was quite effective in achieving its goal. I think Levine is a good storyteller, and most of what was in the book served the story well. I think I generally like exposition more than most of you, as a rule, so talking about clove hitches and whatnot is no issue for me. But I did at times think ‘Why didn’t he just write a historical adventure? This Martian nonsense doesn’t do much for me.’
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    @Apocryphal said:
    I think I generally like exposition more than most of you, as a rule, so talking about clove hitches and whatnot is no issue for me.

    This made me laugh :) A good friend of mine who acts as a kind of beta reader for me is always saying that I should bring in more by way of clove hitches and the like, as he also appreciates that kind of detail. There's a passage in my current WIP where I go into geeky descriptions as to why the blade of a stone axe goes through the wooden haft and not vice versa, which he greatly enjoyed.

    But I did at times think ‘Why didn’t he just write a historical adventure? This Martian nonsense doesn’t do much for me.’

    Yes, this is a good point. I found myself wondering at times why he invented a race of Martians (and, in the second book, Venusians) when he could have just used downtrodden people. I decided there might have been two reasons
    1) he is writing in that tradition of SF which assumes that life is superabundant in the galaxy, and will emerge anywhere it possibly can, opening the possibility of all kinds of splendid descriptions. We've read several of this kind of book in the past, and I always think of it as going back to EE (Doc) Smith, who lavishly populated his worlds, rather than Asimov, who almost never wrote of aliens.
    2) It allows Arabella to establish links, firstly through language and then through sympathy, with "the downtrodden" without her having to cross cultural and social barriers against this. The act of her bothering to learn the alien language and thereby understand something of their culture gives her a huge advantage

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