Larklight by Philip Reeve
2 Sir Waverley Rain is our greatest industrialist, and one of the wealthiest men in the Solar System. He started out as a humble cog-buffer in the spaceship yards of Liverpool, but his natural genius soon asserted itself and he made his first fortune by devising Rain’s Patent Auto-Urchin, a mechanical boy who could be sent up chimneys too tall or poisonous for real orphans to sweep. He now owns vast manufactories upon the Martian moons, producing automatic servants and labourers of every type, and also engages in many other engineering ventures. He is terribly reclusive, and seldom leaves his secluded house, The Beeches, Mars.
3 The portrait shows Mother looking very young and beautiful, just as she must have appeared to Father when she attended the lecture he was giving at the Working Men’s Institute at Cambridge in the autumn of 1832. The lecture was entitled Some Recent Theories on the Origins of the Planets, and I’m afraid Father made rather a hash of it, because he was put off by the charming lady sitting in the front row, who kept smiling as if his words amused her. But later she sought him out and apologised, and introduced herself as Miss Amelia Smith of Ely, whose work on song flowers Father had long admired. By Christmastide they were engaged, and the following spring they were married.
4 abbr. British Standard Gravity
5 The Royal College of Alchemists call this light the ‘Benign Effulgence’. Somehow, as the chemical wedding reaches full pitch, it causes the aether around the ship to slip slightly out of harmony with the rest of Creation, forming a bubble or cradle of Alchemical Space, in which she may travel along at tremendous speeds without being torn asunder, or having her crew smeared across the back wall like dollops of raspberry jam. The luminous bow-wave of alchemically-altered particles which surrounds our ships have led our aethernauts to talk of ‘riding upon Sir Isaac (Newton)’s Golden Roads’ when they speak of travelling at speed between the worlds.
6 Well, he still looked crabbish really, but I am sure you take my meaning.
7 Or perhaps I mean crabs body.
8 phiz = physiognomy, which means face, as any schoolboy knows.
9 This comes from a poem called ‘The Garden’ by A. Marvell. I looked it up later, and it is awful tosh. My favourite poem is ‘How Horatius Held the Bridge’, but I suppose that would not have been so appropriate to Jack’s family circumstances.
10 Your Martian worm is a maggoty looking fellow about the size of a first-class railway carriage. Apparently the Martians who ride them can tell one end from the other, but I doubt anyone else can. They have a great number of small legs underneath, like a caterpillar, and like caterpillars they are the larval stage of a quite different creature. After living about one hundred years they dig themselves a burrow in the sand, wrap a silk cocoon about themselves, and emerge six months later as dull brown moths no bigger than pocket handkerchiefs, which flap about for a single day, then drop down dead. Isn’t Nature wonderful? – A. M.
11 These are the lights which so perplexed Signor Galileo when he turned his telescope on Jupiter’s moons, and led him to develop his theory that the worlds beyond Earth were full of life. This got him into terrible hot water with the Pope, as every schoolboy knows.
12 Some natural philosophers, however, have claimed that it is spores from the Jovian moons, drifting across the aether, which are responsible for the peculiar fads and crazes which sweep our own world from time to time. And indeed what other rational explanation can there be for the popularity of check trousers, or ballet?
13 Later we learned that Snifter Gruel had survived. Charred and unconscious he was flung around in the Jovian atmosphere for several days, but Thunderhead made sure the villain never fell deep enough to be crushed, and when he had fought off those other storms he wafted him towards a passing whaler, which took him home to Io. There, Mr Gruel soon recovered from his burns. The only lasting effect of the lightning strike was that he had become magnetic. Pots, pans, cutlery and wood nails all stuck fast to his body, just as they do to a real magnet. Mr Gruel found this irritating at first, and it ended his career as a pressure-ship captain, for all the Uncrushable’s instruments went wild when he came near them. But he soon found another way to make his living. He became quite a success at fairs and circuses under the name of ‘Attracto, the Astounding Human Magnet’, and later wrote a book in which he claimed to have fallen right into the heart of Jupiter and met there with Mrs Abishag Chough and a number of Higher Beings, who had given him his strange magnetic powers and sent him home bearing a message of great importance to all mankind. I don’t recall what the message was, but it had something to do with peace, brotherhood and donating lots of money to Snifter Gruel.
14 Some people claim to have seen mysterious pinions of golden light sprouting from the airborne house. The Poet Laureate mentions them in his ‘Ode upon the Emergency in London’, the one where he writes, ‘What apparition springs upon my sight?/Abode of Angels, borne on wings of light!’ But he was hiding under an old tin bath in Hyde Park Gardens at the time and can’t have seen it for himself, so yah and boo to him.
15 Which is a very big ‘if’ if you ask me, but nobody did, so I politely held my tongue.
16 Except this wun.
A Selection of the Charming Reviews LARKLIGHT Has Received from
Some of the Nation’s Esteemed Houses of Journalism
‘Inspired space adventure.’
SUNDAY TIMES, TOP 5 BOOKS OF THE YEAR
‘Larklight is completely engrossing, miss-your-tube-station excellent.
The first in a new series by the writer of the popular Mortal Engines
quartet, it is a brilliantly witty quest set in outer space that will get
children turning pages at the speed of light.’
TELEGRAPH
‘The rollicking, devil-may-care attitude of the book is an absolute
delight. This book will provide enjoyment for all ages, and I long
for more from Reeve’s pen.’
LITERARY REVIEW
‘Reeve’s mechanical fantasy world is every bit as enthralling as in his
Mortal Engines, and Wyatt’s illustrations add to the fascination.’
INDEPENDENT
‘Satisfying, enjoyable and engaging. Mr Reeve has done it again.’
MR PHILIP ARDAGH, GUARDIAN
‘It keeps you gripped all the way through.’
SUNDAY EXPRESS
‘Fantasy and history are most entertainingly combined in this
ingenious and inventive story of Victorian space travel, “decorated
throughout” by David Wyatt.’
THE IRISH TIMES, CHILDREN’S BOOKS OF THE YEAR
‘Elegantly constructed, a frothy confection of fanciful imagery
and fantastical footnotes.’
GUARDIAN
‘Larklight is a glorious space adventure set in 1851. Forget what
history tells you, and enjoy this laugh-out-loud, old-style page-
turner which is coupled with David Wyatt’s fantastic illustrations.’
FUNDAY TIMES
‘It’s a fully illustrated book – pictures by David Wyatt – that
harks back to the adventure stories I remember reading as a child.
Any fan of fantasy or science will love it.’
MR CHARLIE HIGSON, MAIL ON SUNDAY
‘Remarkable … Out of this world.’
SUNDAY TIMES
‘Truly original.’
PUBLISHING NEWS, STARRED CHOICE
‘An exhilarating space novel.’
FIRST NEWS
‘It’s hard to pin down Philip Reeve’s prodigious imagination in just
a few words. It’s Monty Python meets Dan Dare meets Diary of a
Nobody, and it rattles along, cheekily tangling historical figures in
Reeve’s brilliant fictional web.’
SUNDAY HERALD
‘Imaginative and great fun to read this is a splendidly produced
book, complete with end papers advertising Victorian artefacts.’
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Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney
First published in Great Britain in October 2006 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
36 Soho Square, London, W1D 3QY
First published in the USA in October 2006 by Bloomsbury Books for Young Readers
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
This electronic edition published in July 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Text copyright © Philip Reeve 2006
Illustrations copyright © David Wyatt 2006
The moral rights of the author and illustrator have been asserted
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4088 2549 5
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Philip Reeve, Larklight