A Son of the Rock

Wizard Tower Press, 2021, 345 p, £15.00. Reviewed for ParSec 2.

The pitch for this will have been straightforward enough. “English girls’ boarding school stories. On Mars.” Intriguing, perhaps hard to resist, promising an amalgamation of the teenage genre of chums and escapades and the Scientific Romance. Even if unacquainted with the precise inspiration (Elinor M Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School books, to the author of which this one is dedicated) the boarding school setting is surely well-known to most readers – though Mars may not be – liable to be greeted with enthusiasm for those with fond memories. Indeed, there are no fewer than ten encomia for the concept, from names recognisable and not, preceding chapter one.

To the Crater School, then, which occupies an old hotel on Mars on the shores of Crater Lake, built for tourists who never came and abandoned for years till the school was founded, situated beyond the end of the line, for which the nearest town, Terminus, at the hairpin junction – albeit via a cascade – of two canals, was named. The lake is home to merlins, mysterious and potentially dangerous Martian creatures (or perhaps, they too, like the humans, are imports; not all such background detail is fully sketched in) with a complicated life-cycle involving nymphs, naiads and imagos. (No, one of the girls corrects herself, the Latin plural is imagines.)

Add in that Mars is the furthest flung outpost of the British Empire of the Empress Eternal – a seemingly unaging Queen Victoria – recently engaged in a Great War with the Russia of a Tsar whose forces have captured both Martian moons, Deimos and Phobos, and glower down on the colonists using the telescopes the British were obliged to abandon, a steam driven funicular (which technically isn’t a funicular, do keep up,) not to mention an airship, and we have a mix to tease and entice.

A boarding school does of course embody the prime requisite of the children’s adventure story, the absence of parents, even if it is modified by the (only slightly) inhibiting existence of teachers, mistresses in this case. Parents, though, are a preoccupation of three of our characters, red-headed sisters Verity and Charm Buchanan whose artist mother has a mysterious secret to keep concealed but thought hiding them in plain sight at the Crater School while she went off on urgent business would be a good idea, and another new girl, Rachel Abramoff, separated, to her mind cruelly, from her twin Jessica, by parents who thought they should spend some time apart.

But three twins at the Crater School? Yes, because near identical Tawney and Tasha Miskin (like Rachel, of Russian origin) make up our quintumvirate of leads, though there is more than a passing role for the redoubtable Head Girl, Rowany de Vere.

Brenchley slightly updates this universe of aether ships, Great Game manoeuvrings and the truly indigenous sandcats when the Russians broadcast propaganda presented by a turncoat and using the call sign, Phobos calling. This is Phobos calling, but remains true to the times of Scientific Romance since boys are sent to public schools in England rather than kept on Mars. A somewhat odder inclusion is of farmers of Basque origin working the lands near the crater.

While not lacking in incident, the usual suspects of friendship, pluck and getting into scrapes, there is really little by way of plot except for the Buchanans being beset by Russian agents and Rachel’s campaign to be reunited with Jessica.

Despite Brenchley taking care also to embed allusions to Science Fiction (one of the pupils is named Pat Cadigan for example,) technically, since the Mars on display here is so unlike the one we know about in the real world, this ought to be classified as a fantasy, but being perhaps true to the (lack of) knowledge of Mars pertaining in the age when the schoolgirl tale was queen in that respect it can be given a pass. The introduction in the last few chapters of yet another girl, Pete, obsessed with steam engines, shrewdly amplifies the scope for sequels.

This is undeniably entertaining, if undemanding, reading, though there was a noticeable number of words or phrases irritatingly repeated in close proximity. For instance, “it was clear that” appeared in successive lines and there was a sentence beginning, “It was tolerably clear tolerably early on,” (was this sort of thing a habit of Brent-Dyer?) Using the spelling ‘mediaeval’ was a pleasing touch, however. In all though, while it will almost certainly delight fans of girls’ school stories there may not be quite enough Science Fictional content to elicit the same emotion in that audience. But they may be taken along by the ride.

Pedant’s corner:- “and even so: little cries of pain” (no need for that colon, a comma would do,) Miss Peters’ (Peters’s,) a Martian weed that is ‘something between animal and vegetable’ is described as ‘not alive’ (well; animals are alive, plants are alive, so something in between must also be alive,) “none of the part were wearing pioneer smocks” (none … was wearing,) “threatened to rise to a crescendo” (the crescendo is the rise!) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (x2,) “who found to wit to mutter” (found the wit,) “‘we could all use a sandwich’” (is a USianism very unlikely to be uttered by a Victoria schoolgirl,) behooves (behoves.)