Storm on Venus

It’s September 1929, the gilded end of the Roaring Twenties. Hemlines are high, jazz bands play and flappers dance the Charleston. Newly returned from Darkest Africa and eager to join in the fun, young colonial officer Wilfred Carstairs is heading for the party of the year. But even as he races a mysterious rival in his beloved sports car, something unimaginably faster is plunging towards him out of the blackness of space. Soon his life and the lives of his friends will be changed forever as they are transported to a world of ceaseless danger, merciless evil and remarkably revealing female apparel — a waking nightmare from which there seems no escape. Can our intrepid hero save the girl of his dreams? What is the butler’s shocking secret? And will they ever beat the aliens at cricket? Share their roller-coaster adventure and find out . . .

Author’s note:

At around the time of the First World War, there began to be novels set on other worlds. Posterity has labelled these tales “science fiction,” but in truth there was little or no science in them. Rather they were an extension of the “lost world” genre of adventure stories, often set in Africa or central Asia, such as those by Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice-Burroughs. It was, indeed, Rice-Burroughs who first moved into space (at least, in the English-speaking world) with his long series of Mars novels. I have always thought it a pity that nothing similar was published in the UK until much later – all those great gags wasted – so I decided to write a thoroughly English version, sticking, as closely as possible, to the style and vocabulary of the 1920s.

How to go about it? It seemed natural to feature the upper classes. They are intrinsically funny, it’s okay to take the piss out of them, and they somehow typify the interwar years. They are caricatures of course, my characters, but I’ve tried to make them rounded ones! There’s class arrogance, a general contempt for Johnny Foreigner and a distressing (to most of us) obsession with huntin’ and shootin,’ but there’s also loyalty, humour in adversity, self-deprecating heroism, and a touching wish to “do the right thing.” I became quite fond of them. There remained only to add an abundance of fast-paced action, romance, tragedy, suspense, a thoroughly nasty ‘baddy,’ and a generous supply of exotic Venusian wildlife, and the job was done! It was all huge fun, and I hope you will find it so too.