A Honeymoon in Space: Book Review

George Griffith was a prolific fantasy author at the turning of the 20th century. “A Honeymoon in Space” was serialized in Pearson’s Magazine in 1900, about midpoint in his writing career, though this is the first by Griffith that I have read.

Lord Redgrave, the builder and pilot of the antigravity spacecraft Astronef, begins with the kidnapping the lovely young American girl Zaide Rennick from off the deck of a trans-Atlantic cruise ship.

The nearest approach to it would have been the old-fashioned Tartar custom which made it lawful for a man to steal his best girl, if he could get her first, fling her across his horse's crupper and ride away with her to his tent.

Perfect gentleman, that Lord Redgrave. The point is made multiple times that hagh above the clouds, the laws of man cannot reach. But it’s OK because we learn that she is the daughter of the Professor Rennick who developed the R. Force antigravity technology and was financed by Lord Redgrave. It’s not really a kidnapping if she consents to his advances for having fallen in love with him previously, is it?

The other thing we get introduced to right off is the racism. I know this was written in 1900 and we have to recognize it for the time that it was, but it’s still racism, no matter how they affirmatively spin it. Here, Lord Redgraves’s the first encounter with Zaide Rennick:

Then he caught sight of a well and fondly remembered face which he had not seen for over two years. It was a face which possessed at once the fair Anglo-Saxon skin, the firm and yet delicate Anglo-Saxon features, and the wavy wealth of the old Saxon gold-brown hair; but a pair of big, soft, pansy eyes, fringed with long, curling, black lashes, looked out from under dark and perhaps just a trifle heavy eyebrows. Moreover, there was that indescribable expression in the curve of her lips and the pose of her head; to say nothing of a lissome, vivacious grace in her whole carriage which proclaimed her a daughter of the younger branch of the Race that Rules.

Race that Rules. He capitalizes that as that is its proper name.

The ship next proceeds on a whirlwind tour of the United States, using the marvel of the flying ship to influence the re-election of the pro-business and gold-standard president. (Somewhat surprising for Griffith being a socialist.) They are also, by their mere presence and the threat of a hundred such ships, able to avert a brewing war between the British-German alliance and the villain French and Russians who had undercut the Empire by coming to an agreement with the Chinese that threw the “Race that Rules” out of the Far East.

Finally, they are on their way to space.

They travel first to the moon where the skeletons of its former inhabitants are found. Then on to Mars where another dying world has giant men of pure, emotionless intellect. Venus is peopled by childlike winged literal angels in a garden utopia. Jupiter is a molten world with giant, jellyfish-like monsters floating in the clouds while the moon Ganymede has another giant race of people, facing the cooling death of their civilization and world with calm dignity. Saturn presents the history of everything with the equatorial zone populated with primordial monsters, the more temperate zones with higher life forms and the men climbing towards the summit of civilization nearer the poles.

And that’s pretty much it for plot. There is no development of characters or story. No theme or overarching message. Just a bunch of vignettes, each with only a mild or vague point. At best.

One such point seems to be that bad people are ugly and good people are beautiful. The Martians, who begin by attacking the Astronef as soon as it arrives in their skies, are revealed to be unattractive, thuggish beings as they have (as we are repeatedly told) evolved beyond emotion. The crew has no hesitation or remorse in gunning them down with revolvers and Maxim machine guns when they are covetous of Zaidie’s beauty.

Also, the Martians speak English. Of course, they don’t know it as English, but being purely evolved intellectuals they had, of course, developed the most pure and efficient language and it just so happens to be identical to English.

Fancy that. More proof of the perfection that is the “Race that Rules.”

After the overly-intellectual brutes that were the Martians, the angelic beings of Venus are all that is beautiful and good. Just as Zaidie is beautiful and good. Beautiful, therefore good. When the pair decides to leave Venus it is the only moment of humility in the entire narrative as they conclude that, as beautiful as the world is, they must leave because, no matter how good and beautiful they were in the Anglo-Saxon heritage, Original Sin made them “a couple of plague-spots in a sinless world.”

Something else I noticed was carefully not said.

"Well, have you said goodbye to your native world? It is a bit solemn, isn't it, saying goodbye to a world that you have been born on; which contains everything that has made up your life, everything that is dear to you?"

"Not quite everything," she said, looking up at him—"at least I don't think so."

He lost no time in making the only reply which was appropriate under the circumstances; and then he said, drawing her close to him:

"Nor I, as you know, darling. This is our world, a world travelling among worlds, and since I have been able to bring the most delightful of the daughters of Terra with me, I, at any rate, am perfectly happy. Now, I think it's getting on to supper time, so if your Ladyship will go to your household duties, I'll have a look at my engines and make everything snug for the voyage."

“The only reply which was appropriate” was apparently a kiss. Or so it would seem given the dialogue. Was he so prudish that he could say he kissed his wife? In a later scene he does kiss her, so it doesn't seem that the language is hiding something as innocuous as a kiss. Later still when they are visiting the Jovian moon Callisto:

Redgrave, as usual, went into the air-chamber and tried the atmosphere. A second's experience of it was enough for him. It was unbreathably thin and unbearably cold, although, when mixed with the air of the Astronef, it distinctly freshened it up. This proved that its composition was, or had been, fit for human respiration.

"There's only one fault about it," he said, when he rejoined Zaidie in the sitting-room. "You know what the schoolboy said when he started kissing his first sweetheart, 'It takes too long to get enough of it.'"

"You seem to be very fond of referring to that particular subject, Lenox."

"Well, yes; to tell you the truth I am," and then he referred to it again in another form.

After this they went and put on their breathing-dresses and went for a welcome stroll along the arid shores of the frozen sea after their lengthy confinement to the decks of the Astronef.

OK, now I’m pretty sure that “other form” was not just a kiss. I immediately read the next scene as like Kirk pulling on his boots or Bond buttoning his shirt. Something you can’t show but it’s pretty obvious.

They are married, after all.

There are some clever parts like that but, for the most part, it’s not very interesting. “A Honeymoon in Space” is a fantasy travelogue with little plot, no drama, and zero character development.


A quote that I will keep for future reference:

"A beautiful woman always looks most beautiful when she is just a little angry."