A fey young woman invents power for new form of air ship, a young man invents a new bomb with intention of blackmailing nations into peace.

"...like the majority of men they grow impatient with clever women, they prefer stupid ones. In fact they deliberately choose stupid ones to be the mothers of their children, hence the ever increasing multitude of fools!"

Theres a sub-genre called 'Edisonian', about inventors mostly boy inventors, inspirde by Thomas Edison. This book i'm going to classify as 'Curiepisode' (i'm not great at suffixes ;) ), as inspired by Marie Curie.
A tale of a man and woman, both geniuses, he a penniless academic, she a scrooge mcduck level of wealthy heiress. Both discover a new energy source and this story tells how they each decide to use it. At least thats the general plot outline but doesn't really matter much in the grand scheme.
I would describe them both as self-centered, manic depressive, religious nuts with varying degress of meglomania.

Corelli was apparently very popular in the 1890s unfortnately it doesn't seen her writing changed much since then or that she learned much in the 30 years between.
The physics in this is laughable, the engineering absurd, even the medicine is nonsense. Also its plagued with psuedo-religious theories that would make Dan Brown blush.

It all feels incredibly dated. I think it might be feminist but its views of women are so oldfashioned as to be quite annoying.
The writing itself isn't bad and the meglomania and religious mystery elements are interesting but not utiliszed a lot.
Overall the lenght, boredom and datedness all combined to slowly drop it to one star. I didn't hate reading it but certainly can't recommend it.

Edit: Made available by the Merril Collection. ( )

Very fantastical mystical romance. Out there. ( )