For plot-related reasons, I needed Wickham to be more competent than the short-sighted grifter who wreaked so much havoc in the original novel. Even so, he ends up working too many angles at once and having things blow up in his face. I can’t tell you more than that without spoilers.

I was obliged to strip Lady Catherine of her title, because, like entailments, courtesy titles were just not something that seemed to work with this setting. However, Mrs. Catherine DeBourgh does serve in the House of Resources in  Parliament, a role which the original Lady Catherine would have appreciated. Mrs. DeBourgh is still a self-important meddler, but she has much more scope for meddling out in the Kuiper Belt than Lady Catherine had in Kent, and so she ends up being much more of a villainess than the original. She’s a somewhat more nuanced figure than Wickham, in that she’s lost people she cared about, and might possibly have started out with good intentions, but she’s still trouble for those in her orbit.  

I had originally conceived of the Space Austen project as one long book with all Austen’s plots squeezed in. For instance, at that stage, Georgiana Darcy and Jack Bennet were supposed to be Anne Elliot/Frederick Wentworth analogues. Eventually, the project morphed into a trilogy, but not before I had noticed that Fanny Price and Mrs. Norris were basically lower-gentry versions of Anne DeBourgh and Lady Catherine, that Mary Crawford was a dark mirror image of Elizabeth Bennet and Sir Thomas Bertram was arguably one for Mr. Darcy.  

This led to me adding William Price to the crew of the Last Repose, and making Miss Frances “Effie” Price into Mrs. DeBourgh’s put-upon secretary. Edmund Bertram became Edmund DeBourgh, nephew of Mrs. DeBourgh’s late husband. He serves a role somewhat similar to Colonel Fitzwilliam in P&P in that Elizabeth is charmed by him but ultimately not seriously attracted to him. There was no Henry Crawford to woo Miss Price, and provide competition for Edmund, but Wickham cheerfully volunteered for the job. It seemed to line up with some half-baked scheme of his own. To a large extent Effie Price is our eyes on the villains’ activities in this book, even though she isn’t one herself. 

How did all that importing and combining of characters play out? Well, it is astonishing how fast the core plot of Mansfield Park whizzes by when you replace Sir Thomas and Miss Crawford with a pair of responsible adults, however proud or prejudiced, and Henry Crawford with someone more interested in deluding others than deluding himself. But I’ll let you find out the details for yourself in Pride & Planetoids.