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I've never claimed Vernon makes high literature, but she is very competent at her craft. I was supposed to go bed early, but read the whole thing in one evening.

I knew lunar regolith is on par or worse than asbestos, and I knew Mars don't have a magnetosphere, making radiation as bad as in space. What I didn't know is that Martian soil is actually toxic to both animal and plant life, that the bags of astronaut feces on the Moon are considered US property, that one of the reasons the US refuses to sign the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea is because it can have an impact on extra-terrestrial mining.

Neither was I aware the the lower end population limit to start a successful Martian colony is in the six digits. And even then the colonist straight up needs to embrace eugenics in order to make the colony survive beyond the first few generations.

All in all a very interesting and thought provoking read that makes a compelling argument that space settlements should be put on hold for now.

Started on this ages ago, completely forgot it because of some other release I wanted to read first, picked it up again recently. Only a few chapters in, but the book has already persuaded me that anybody advocating for colonies on Mars within the forseeable future are delusional idiots with no regard for human life.

Good grief this felt even more dated than the Stoker tripe I read recently. And it's not written very well either. For the next Norton read I'll just skip ahead a few decades and hope the writing improves.

Good grief, van Helsing and that other doctor are really thick as bricks aren't they? "Ok, so these idiots have self sabotaged our previous attempts at thwarting the malign presence that almost kills this girl at a nightly basis. Let's try the exact same thing a few more times just to be sure! And better not tell -anybody- about what we are doing lest they act sensible when something strange happens!"

Also Dracula isn't the brightest either. "Ah, they are on to me. Well, well, I'll just keep my hyper focus on this single girl instead of just moving along and finding other victims. And yeah, I will recruit a fucking wolf from a zoo to break a window for me because I can't just fucking pick up a brick and throw it thru the glass for some reason."

"And when the wolf has broken the window, the maid servants will all be so frightened that they will go straight into the sherry. Which I of course has laced with laudanum, conveniently left behind by Dr van Helsing!"

The only way this makes sense if you view it thru the lense of a point and click adventure game.

As others have pointed out - this novel must have been wild to read when it first came out. Today the concept of the vampire is so well known, that even if you have never consumed any vampire specific media, you still will be very aware of Dracula just by cultural osmosis. The first few chapters would have hit completely different if you had never heard about Transylvania.