When I first came up with the idea for Pride & Planetoids, I decided that Elizabeth Bennet needed to be some kind of Parliamentary backbencher. Spending time in the remote work/zoom conference culture of the early 2020s made it more believable to me that she could live at Longbourn and still participate in the Parliament of Albion the Commonwealth, without having to travel to Albion, the asteroid which gave its name to the Commonwealth. There were a whole horde of supporting characters who were also believable as minor politicians in a large Parliament, which meant that Mr. Collins, Mr. Hurst, etc were all accounted for. I still had to figure out where the Bennet family sat in this society, and that meant figuring out the society itself. 

What passes for an aristocracy in this culture, you have already met, in the shape of Mr. Darcy, Marcher. The Marchers were originally men and women from extremely wealthy families who converted some of the largest asteroids in the area into marcher-ships, capable of teleporting to intercept and destroy rogue asteroids. I decided that the “gentry” would own and develop asteroids in the Kuiper Belt. There would be a working class who did not own asteroids or chunks of asteroids larger than an apartment complex. They had fairly technical jobs, with the grunt work being handed off to hovering drones run by AIs. I now had the House of Commons and the House of Resources in Parliament, and some idea of how the Bennet family occupied their time. Longbourn, home of Longbourn Mining Company, was a rubble type asteroid, made up of both metallic and icy asteroid chunks. This would make it valuable as a supplier of raw materials to the Last Repose, and offer a reason for Darcy to pay several visits to the area. 

Already in the Austen novel, Mr. Bennet was not quite the useless drone his detractors make him out to be. He took an active interest in the home farm, kept his family out of debt in spite of his wife’s best efforts, and the narrator indicated business was the one thing he was not “dilatory” (lazy) about. I reimagined him as a geologist and engineer, with a technical mind, who puts what socialization skills he has into managing board meetings. Like the original, he is what we would call a cultured man, with thoughts about the kings of ancient Rome before it became a Republic. He does not like the AIs of his setting, which he calls Artificial Idiots, although he does (grudgingly) use them. 

Mrs. Bennet seemed to me to be some kind of PR/marketing type. Her short fuse and lack of a brain-mouth filter keep her from being much good at it. She dabbles in exotic plants, although it takes the combined efforts of Mr. Bennet, the Artificial Idiots, and the household drones to keep her pet plants alive. She is a somewhat nicer person than the whiny, childishly manipulative egomaniac in the original novel. Kitty and Lydia were originally supposed to be PR/marketing types like their mother, but eventually showed a more “techie” side, with Lydia’s less wise decisions being tied to misuses of her tech skills rather than just being young, stupid and horny. I decided to use Kitty as the Catherine Moreland/Margaret Dashwood figure in a Northanger Abbey/S&S mashup, so she also gained a little more depth in Pride & Planetoids, and will hopefully gain more depth as I write the NA/S&S book. 

Mary got assigned the job of company accountant, more because of her personality type than anything about her skills in the source material. There she spent all her time virtue-signaling about her book-learning and musicality. I imported a set of Mansfield Park characters (more about them in another post), which in turn gave Mary a boyfriend.  

There are some good versions of Jane Bennet and Charles Bingley in the adaptations. I personally am fond of the 1980 miniseries’s take on this couple, for instance. But I always found these two really boring in the original novel. And since I couldn’t justify the entailment subplot in this setting, there was no plot-based reason for the Bennets to have an all-daughter family. Instead, I combined Jane and Charles into one male character, John Charles Bennet, commonly called Jack. Trained as a pilot, he’s Longbourn’s logistics officer. He’s also an easy-going guy who has a messy history with Georgiana Darcy. The messiness is not his fault, of course, nor Georgiana’s. But Darcy disapproves of him anyway, which contributes to the friction between Darcy and Jack’s loyal sister Elizabeth.  

Georgiana and Jack are fun people but not really the near-doormats that Jane and Charles were in the source material. They just keep on quietly seeing each other, in the teeth of Darcy’s overprotective attitude and Elizabeth’s disapproval of Georgiana’s brother. The role of sweet, downtrodden young couple goes to a pair of characters I imported from Mansfield Park and plopped down in Mrs. Catherine DeBourgh’s orbit, but more about that in another post.