Terrestrial Passions: a Regency Romance with Aliens

This is Somtow’s 3rd Vella Series. It is a definite departure from the last two excellent series offerings. A Regency Romance – extraterrestrial mashup that will keep you hooked and happily reading week by week waiting to see what can possibly happen next.
I LOVE Somtow’s imaginative mind, his humor and when it comes to Vella, his ability to captivate his readers with each episode AND to leave them hanging and waiting for more.
Start reading NOW … you too will love it!
– a diehard FAN

Terrestrial Passions:
a Regency Romance with Aliens

The widowed Mrs. Dorrit lives a marginal existence with her brother, a vicar, and twin daughters in a cottage on the estate of her wealthy cousin, Lord Chuzzlewit, in the West London village of Little Chiswick. As the season dawns and a rakish Earl takes up residence in the once-abandoned Flanders House nearby, their lives, and the marital prospects of Emma’Alma’s daughters, become immeasurably complicated when a starship lands in her apple orchard.

Is Monsieur Clatoux merely a Frenchman with blue skin and pointy ears? Will the Earl pick one of Mrs. Dorrit’s wayward daughters? Will the entire ton go to hell for attending a Catholic nobleman’s ball? Is there an alternate universe where King George didn’t lose America? Will the scandalous newfangled German dance, the waltz, become a new source of debauchery in this innocent English community? Will Clatoux be able to construct a telephonic device out of a broken bicycle and contact his home in France?

World Fantasy Award winner S.P. Somtow has created a deadpan, outrageous cross between a Regency Romance and E.T. With the ironic tone of a Jane Austen novel, and humorous references to all the main tropes of science fiction, “Terrestrial Passions” is a wild romp that strikes a few serious notes about women of the early nineteenth century rebelling against their patriarchal society.

About the Author

Once referred to by the International Herald Tribune as ‘the most well-known expatriate Thai in the world,’ Somtow Sucharitkul is no longer an expatriate, since he has returned to Thailand after five decades of wandering the world. He is best known as an award-winning novelist and a composer of operas.

Born in Bangkok, Somtow grew up in Europe and was educated at Eton and Cambridge. His first career was in music and in the 1970s, his first return to Asia, he acquired a reputation as a revolutionary composer, the first to combine Thai and Western instruments in radical new sonorities. Conditions in the arts in the region at the time proved so traumatic for the young composer that he suffered a major burnout, emigrated to the United States, and reinvented himself as a novelist.

His earliest novels were in the science fiction field and he soon won the John W. Campbell for Best New Writer as well as being nominated for and winning numerous other awards in the field. But science fiction was not able to contain him and he began to cross into other genres. In his 1984 novel Vampire Junction, he injected a new literary inventiveness into the horror genre, in the words of Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, ‘skillfully combining the styles of Stephen King, William Burroughs, and the author of the Revelation to John.’ Vampire Junction was voted one of the forty all-time greatest horror books by the Horror Writers’ Association, joining established classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. He has also published children’s books, a historical novel, and about a hundred works of short fiction.

In the 1990s Somtow became increasingly identified as a uniquely Asian writer with novels such as the semi-autobiographical Jasmine Nights and a series of stories noted for a peculiarly Asian brand of magic realism, such as Dragon’s Fin Soup, which is currently being made into a film directed by Takashi Miike. He recently won the World Fantasy Award, the highest accolade given in the world of fantastic literature, for his novella The Bird Catcher. His seventy-plus books have sold about two million copies world-wide. He has been nominated for or won over forty awards in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

After becoming a Buddhist monk for a period in 2001, Somtow decided to refocus his attention on the country of his birth, founding Bangkok’s first international opera company and returning to music, where he again reinvented himself, this time as a neo-Asian neo-Romantic composer. The Norwegian government commissioned his song cycle Songs Before Dawn for the 100th Anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize, and he composed at the request of the government of Thailand his Requiem: In Memoriam 9/11 which was dedicated to the victims of the 9/11 tragedy.

According to London’s Opera magazine, ‘in just five years, Somtow has made Bangkok into the operatic hub of Southeast Asia.’ His operas on Thai themes, Madana and Mae Naak, have been well received by international critics.

Somtow has recently been awarded the 2017 Europa Cultural Achievement Award for his work in bridging eastern and western cultures. In 2020 he returned to science fiction after a twenty-year absence with “Homeworld of the Heart”, a fifth novel in the Inquestor series.