One of the pleasures I take from attending scifi conventions is finding new-to-me authors whose works I want to try out. David D. Levine was one of the finds I made at NorWesCon 40 in SeaTac this March.

I just finished reading his steampunk regency adventure, Arabella of Mars, the first of a projected series. In 1812, Arabella Ashby is an upper-class young lady of sixteen living on English-colonized Mars with an uptight mother and liberal-minded but distracted father.

Arabella and her older brother Michael are cared for by a native Martian nanny who trains them in survival and Martian customs. Like other Martians, Khema is a strong land-dwelling crustacean-like being approximately seven feet tall, toiling as a servant for the colonizing English. The planet is harsh but habitable with an atmosphere, rivers, and native plants and animals — the setup reminds me of stories set in 1800s African colonies. There’s regular trade between Mars and Earth via airships that use a combination of sails and hot-air bags to traverse a route that can take anywhere from a few months when the planets are at perigee to years when they are at apogee. Soon after the book begins, an extremely unwilling Arabella is dragged “home” to England by her mother.

Within weeks of their arrival, sad news from Mars combined with the male-only entailment system of inheritance provokes Arabella to return to Mars. To do so she must pose as a boy and crew on a merchant ship run by an Indian captain. Arabella shared her father’s passion for automatons, and Captain Singh hires “Arthur Ashby” to help him with his mysterious clockwork navigator.

Most of the story is a compelling tale of Arabella learning the ropes, and Levine does a fabulous job painting the imaginative details of life aboard a regency spaceship. The reader cheers as Arabella masters everything from serving tea in zero gravity to repelling pirates and understanding the workings of the clockwork navigator. Every new adventure brings with it both increasing camaraderie with her crew mates, and greater fear of exposure as a female.

Sometimes it seems like Arabella overcomes one obstacle after another a little too easily; I would have liked a few more “fails” in the try-fail sequences Levine sets up. And the schoolgirl romance is rather predictable…but then, this is a regency! These are small and forgivable shortcomings in an otherwise enjoyable adventure, and I look forward to the next in the series.