Holmes focuses particularly on the lives and works of Sir Joseph Banks, the astronomers William and Caroline Herschel, and chemist Humphry Davy.

There is a chapter on the early history of ballooning including pioneers Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, Vincent Lunardi, Jean-Pierre Blanchard and James Sadler.

John Keats, in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, compares his first encounter with Homer’s poetry to Herschel’s discovery of Uranus: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken.” Holmes writes that “Among other things, Keats had combined science and poetry in a new and intensely exciting way.” (207) Keats would express negative feelings about science in “Lamia”, where he accused Newton, by “unweav[ing] the rainbow”, of reducing it “to the dull catalogue of common things.” Another Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, said he attended Humphry Davy’s lectures “to enlarge my stock of metaphors.” Davy, Mungo Park and the Arctic explorer William Parry are alluded to by Byron in his satiric epic Don Juan as emblems of the age.

Holmes looks at how the debates around Vitalism contributed to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: “Mary’s brilliance was to see that these weighty and often alarming ideas could be given highly suggestive, imaginative and even playful form... She would develop exactly what William Lawrence had dismissed in his lectures as a ‘hypothesis or fiction.’ Indeed, it was to be an utterly new form of fiction – the science fiction novel.” (327) Holmes bookends his narrative with voyages of discovery.

[8] Peter Forbes of The Independent wrote of the book: "Its heart – the linked stories of Banks, Herschel and Davy – is thrilling: a portrait of bold adventure among the stars, across the oceans, deep into matter, poetry and the human psyche"[9]