Not Wednesday: Arabella of Mars by David Levine

OBDisclaimer: I have met David several times over the years; I'd say we're friendly acquaintances. I've enjoyed many of his short stories; he has a nicely readable writing style, and I hope he keeps writing. It's just this book that didn't work for me.

I just finished reading Arabella of Mars, and I mentioned my issues with it to a few people. At least two of them said, "Oh, yeah, I remember mrissa had problems with that one." Which she did, here. I was going to make some comments there, but decided to make my own post instead.

Issues, I got them. (Spoilers abound.)

First of all, I don't remember why I put this book on hold at the library. Maybe it was the push that the Tor blog gave it? I'd assumed it was from one of James Nicoll's reviews, but no -- when I went to reread his review, I discovered he'd never reviewed it.

mrissa did a fine job of covering the sexism fail, so I'll mostly leave that one alone.

And the entire steampunk setting, with atmosphere between the planets and asteroids with trees growing on them gets an eyeroll but a pass, because that's the one total implausibility that that the entire book is built around.

Leaving all that aside, there's the villain. And what a very convenient villain he is, too. He carefully explains to Arabella just how awful his life is because of his position as second son (Arabella's uncle) and his choice of bad investments. So when Arabella accidentally lets it drop that it might be affordable for him to hock the family silver and run off to Mars to kill her brother (her father, the previous heir, being conveniently dead), he does so -- and when he gets caught in the process of running away, he monologues to justify his necessity.

The next time we see him, he has heroically saved the life of said brother (the villain's nephew), at a time when it would have been entirely plausible to let him die. Not kill him, mind you, just let him die. But he saves him. It might be because he needed the brother the guide both of them to safety, but the impression I got in the book was that he saved him because he wanted the brother to think well of him.

Eventually the villain dies in the process of trying to make Arabella the scapegoat for the villain's own evil deeds. He waffles between actively evil, wishy-washy, and wanting to be a good guy. This could be the interesting depiction of a complex character, but it reads like the description of someone who acts however he needs to for the plot to do what the author wants.

Then there's the ending. Arabella is required to marry immediately, so that (best I can tell) she can produce a son so that the son plus the brother (who is currently in fragile health) can break the entail so that Arabella and her mother and sisters won't be left penniless. Er, what? I read the last few pages a couple of times, and it still made no sense to me. The obvious option in most Regency books would be for Arabella to make a brilliant marriage to a wealthy suitor support her family. Here, the need for a marriage seems to be externally imposed to provide an incentive for Arabella to propose to someone who might otherwise be deemed unsuitable because he's foreign and the wrong skin color (which was also the excuse for a mutiny earlier in the book).

In short, this book doesn't (as I'd hoped) play with the standard tropes of SF and Regency romance to produce something new. Instead, it depends on some of the worst of default assumptions about race and gender to produce a flabby book with an interesting but unbelievable setting.