See also Melissa Scott's alchemical space opera trilogy, The Roads of Heaven: Five Twelths of Heaven, Silence in Solitude and Empress of Earth. Yes, you heard

See also Melissa Scott's alchemical space opera trilogy, The Roads of Heaven: Five Twelths of Heaven, Silence in Solitude and Empress of Earth. Yes, you heard that correctly. Alchemical space opera. Spaceships fly because their keels are impregnated by Philospher's Tincture, which always seeks to return to the celestial world. By stimulating it with a harmonium tuned to the music of the spheres, it can overcome the drag of the ship's mundane matter and rises towards heaven... And if you think that's weird, you should see the FTL drive. Let's just say that the alchemical diagrams pictured in this article are a key to it, and using the right symbology is vitally important. Excellent books, but very hard to find on paper. Luckily, the author has a revised version available in ebook form.