“Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost” by Chaz Brenchley

Review by Duncan Lunan

First published in different form in Parsec # 14, 5^th August 2025.

Since first reviewing this novella, above, I’ve learned a little more about the background than given in the book itself.  Since 2021 Chaz Brenchley has been publishing ‘Crater School’ stories in Salon Futura fanzine, ‘an English girls’ boarding school but transported to the harsh environment of Mars. Former Head Girl Rowany de Vere is perhaps the school’s most renowned pupil;  after graduating from Oxford, she has returned to make her home on the red planet, working for an unnamed department of the Colonial Service.’  

Reviewing Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shroud for Parsec # 13, I wrote,

‘Think what The Martian might be like if Mars was teeming with truly alien life, some of it wanting to help, some unintentionally dangerous and some explicitly carnivorous.‘ 

The back jacket of Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost states, ‘”My name is Rowany de Vere, and I’m with the Colonial Service”…  Her first mission requires her to escort a prominent Russian defector across the hostile surface of Mars, pursued by Russian agents intent on killing them both… if she can’t outsmart strangers who know nothing of her people nor her land, she doesn’t deserve the title on her calling card’.  It’s obviously not the Mars we know, and I had visions of Stanley G. Weinbaum’s A Martian Odyssey, but more dangerous, but this isn’t it.  Its main inspiration is the Mars of Percival Lowell, seamed with canals  (Fig. 2), and enthusiastically adapted by Edgar Rice Burroughs, later by Ray Bradbury, Leigh Brackett and many others.

This Mars has a breathable atmosphere  (as they all did, when I started reading SF), and it’s been settled by the British, seemingly in Victoria’s reign, while Russia under the Tsar holds Venus, and the USA is not in the game.  We aren’t given much detail about the calendar, but its Christmas isn’t synchronised with Earth’s and is celebrated twice in each Martian year of 2.1354 Earth years, so it’s a movable feast in the Martian seasons and the occasion for a big Frost Fair when it coincides with the Martian solstice, as it does in the story.  The canals are frozen, so hardly any Martian life is in evidence, and the ‘merlins’ are deep in sleep below.  Since they’re carnivorous – ‘at any moment you might be eaten, or drowned’, and any cracking of the ice causes major alarm – they must be at the head of a prolific food chain, to maintain the atmosphere, but we don’t hear about it except for hints about parts of the planet where the British writ doesn’t run, such as the South Pole, ‘far outside Charter lands, and no acknowledged human foot had ever trod there, nor ever should’.  The Charter was made after humans came to Mars ‘by invitation’, and they remain ‘on sufferance’ while they make themselves useful – but to whom, and how?  The south polar cap of Mars was originally thought to be temporary, because it often disappeared in its hemisphere’s summer, and that led to the idea that both caps were frozen carbon dioxide rather than water ice.  But although the southern one can be covered by dust at times, as it was during the Mariner 7 flyby in 1969, and both caps are coated with carbon dioxide in their winters, both were proved by Mariner 9 to be water ice  (Fig. 3).

Rowany’s name might have commanded more respect in Victorian times than she has here – she’s not of servant or shopgirl class, but she mentions shops that are out of her price range.  The first earl of Oxford was Aubrey de Vere, who took his logo from a ‘five-pointed star’, possibly a coronal aurora, which he saw overhead at the Battle of Antioch in 1097.  Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604), Lord Great Chamberlain to Elizabeth I, is believed by some to have penned Shakespeare’s works.  The family’s name continued to be distinguished down to the present, but is now available for laughs, as in To the Manner Born.  (My late mother’s no less distinguished Fortescue name is also used now for upper-class twits in sitcoms, which annoyed her quite a bit.)  The Salon Futura website says that she is the daughter of a general, but evidently he’s not one of the ‘sickly parents’ mentioned who live in a sanatorium across the crater.

The Russian defector, going by ‘Leonov’ – Alexei, the cosmonaut who performed the first spacewalk  (whom I’ve met), might have liked that – is posing as an academic, going from Marsport on the Grand Canal to a chess tournament in New Victoria.  He’s deeply upset at being escorted by a girl instead of Colpert, the head of the Colonial Office, whom he was promised and for whom he keeps asking.  The pursuit forces them to detour by train to Terminus, on the edge of the Charter land, to which they’re pursued by airship  (parallels with From Russia With Love are apparent), and they make by funicular for the rim of Lowell crater, where she formerly attended school, so she knows the territory.

(The actual Lowell crater on Mars is a much larger double impact ring, over 200 km across, in Thaumasia, at 52 degrees south, whose central ring might be the result of an explosion of ground ice in the impact  (Fig. 4).  The inspiration here might be an unnamed crater imaged by Mars Express, with an ice-filled lake in it  (Fig. 5), or Korolev crater, on 75 degrees north in Vastitas Borealis, also photographed by Mars Express and permanently filled with ice winter  (Fig. 6). 

At 51 km across it’s still too big for Rowany to see the centre from the rim, but we’re on artistic license here in any case.  I think I might also know the inspiration for the airship, which on present-day Mars would need hot hydrogen for lift.  That would be very dangerous in a breathable atmosphere, but no danger in the carbon dioxide one that Mars has today.

The futuristic documentary Wanderers  (2014)  by Erik Wernquist portrayed one on approach to Cape St. Mary, on the rim of Victoria Crater  (Fig. 7), previously visited by the Curiosity rover  (Figs. 8-10) – surely the name can’t be a coincidence? 

Rowany’s aim is to lure the airship into landing on the crater’s ice, which won’t take its weight – even in Martian gravity!  Here my ‘suspension of disbelief’ gives way:  all but the smallest airships are trimmed for neutral buoyancy near the ground, so they can be pulled around by ropes, but this one goes right through the ice – awakening the ‘lobsterish’ merlins, which come up from below and rip the ship apart to get at the occupants.  As Sean Connery says at a similar moment, ‘One of their aircraft is missing’.  I felt a bit sorry for the Russians:  they hadn’t done any actual harm, even if they meant to, and the one shot they took at Rowany and ‘Leonov’ deliberately missed.  Their original object was to capture Colpert, whom they knew, by then, that they weren’t going to get, and the object here was to retrieve Leonov, who nevertheless makes himself scarce.  Still, Rowany’s got her equivalent of a ‘double-0’ number, and another assignment coming up.  Lightweight as this is, I look forward to that.