Arabella of Mars - Q6

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Did the plot work for you? Were there enough twists and turn in it to occupy you? Or was it too straightforward? Those of you who enjoy Napoleonic Naval literature, did the book resonate with you better because of this? Or was it in that uncanny valley of to close and not close enough?

Comments

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    Yes it did, with my earlier caveat about YA books and lack of depth. I'd like to see the same solar-system mechanics and ideas dressed up in an adult novel and reckon there's plenty of potential for this. The link with Napoleonic stuff was (I think) a kind of shorthand so we'd know how to respond to things, and I'd have liked some more background on the world... for example how when and why did people first think of taking a sailing ship to the top of the terrestrial atmosphere and then sailing on through the interplanetary one? I wasn't looking for something as detailed as The Expanse but I would have liked more internal history and the like.

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    Plot-wise I thought I was fine. It hit a lot of cliches off naval fiction, but I suppose that’s par for the course by now. Would it even be possible to write an original new Napoleonic novel? It’s surely all be done many times over by now, right? But I think that’s the point of these kinds of novels - people read them because they crave the genre conventions, and that’s what the author needs to deliver. I suppose my take is that, given all the Napoleonic tropes, the novel didn’t really deliver the Napoleonic genre very well because it kept muddying the waters with this Ill-thought-out Mars nonsense. I’d have preferred the straight rope, I think.
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    Did Temeraire do a better job of delivering the Napoleonic trope? In both books there are the analogues of the major battles, especially Trafalgar (Arabella book 2) and other similar actions - from memory Temeraire referred to the Battle of the Nile, though of course in this case with dragons as well as ships.

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    For me it wasn’t that this didn’t deliver to Napoleonic trope, it was more that I’m getting tired of the trope, and of it being reskinned in not very original ways. Of the three similar books I preferred the one set inside the Dyson sphere, which at least was a little more original in its setting, and wasn’t really Napoleonic but still felt age of sail.
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