An author has an epiphany, spots a story idea nobody ever had before, writes it in the white heat of inspiration, sends it off and gets a cheque in the mail. All is as it should be. At least, that is, until they discover someone else had the exact same idea at exactly the same time. Or worse—the other person’s version saw print first.
One of the more remarkable examples of this type of unfortunate concurrence occurred in 1979. Working on opposite sides of the planet in an era long before everyone had email, Charles Sheffield and Arthur C. Clarke wrote novels about…well, let me just quote Mr. Clarke’s open letter, which was reprinted at the end of Sheffield’s book…
Early in 1979 I published a novel, The Fountains of Paradise, in which an engineer named Morgan, builder of the longest bridge in the world, tackles a far more ambitious project— an “orbital tower” extending from a point on the equator to geostationary orbit. Its purpose: to replace the noisy, polluting and energy-wasteful rocket by a far more efficient electric elevator system. The construction material is a crystalline carbon filter, and a key device in the plot is a machine named “Spider.”
A few months later another novel appeared in which an engineer named Merlin, builder of the longest bridge in the world, tackles a far more ambitious project— an “orbital tower,” etc. etc. The construction material is a crystalline silicon fiber, and a key device in the plot is a machine named “Spider”…
The situation would have been one very familiar to Clarke, because not only did Clarke, Jack Vance, and Poul Anderson publish stories about solar sailing within a few months of each other in the early 1960s, Clarke and Anderson even used the same title, “Sunjammer.”
For that matter, poor Sheffield ran into a similar situation a few years later when he discovered while conversing with Robert Forward that Sheffield and Forward had more or less simultaneously hit on the idea of using as a setting binary planets orbiting so closely their Roche lobes overlapped.
What’s going on here? Did some service in Schenectady screw up and send the same letter to all of their subscribers?
As Clarke firmly asserted in his open letter, it’s not plagiarism. It is not even the homogenizing effect of a large coterie of authors writing to one editor’s very specific and well-known set of preferences, AKA the John W. Campbell, Jr. Effect[1]. It’s something that must be a lot more frustrating from the perspective of authors: ideas whose time has come. Suddenly, authors decide to write about building orbital elevators[2]. Or about solar sails. Or about collections of super-powered misfits led by men in wheelchairs.
Sometimes, it’s clear what was behind a cluster of stories—new discoveries, theories, and information driving thought and conversation toward a common point of inspiration. Whether directly or indirectly, Stephen Hawking’s “Gravitationally collapsed objects of very low mass” inspired Niven, Sheffield, and Varley, among others—thus “The Hole Man”, “Killing Vector”, and “The Black Hole Passes.” The effects of light pressure on the Echo satellites of the early 1960s may well have played a role in inspiring Vance, Anderson, and Clarke to write about solar sailing. Enthusiasm about space colonies combined with nuclear war-related anxieties are probably behind John Varley’s Gaia trilogy and Joe Haldeman’s thematically similar Worlds series. It’s not all that surprising when authors swimming in the same cultural pool, who subscribe to the same magazines, manifest parallel thought processes.
A lot of the time, though, causality is very unclear, and remains a mystery. The idea of orbital elevators had been around for twenty years (not counting Tsiolkovsky), so what was so special about 1979 in particular that two authors would decide to make orbital elevators the centerpiece of their novels? I have no idea. Maybe it really is that service in Schenectady getting its lines crossed.
1: Which is why so many supposedly hard SF stories of a certain vintage feature awesome mind powers or reactionless drives. Those stories were inspired by the well-known scientific principle that the authors wanted to get a cheque from Campbell, and Campbell really liked stories that featured psionics and egregious violations of Newton’s Laws.
2: It’s very apt that space elevators should have been independently embraced by two different SF authors, because the basic concept of space elevators was invented on at least four separate occasions of which I am aware: Tsiolkovsky in 1895, Artsutanov in 1959, Isaacs, Vine, Bradner, and Bachus in 1966, and Pearson in 1975. Clarke acknowledges Artsutanov and Isaacs in his letter but adds “There have since been at least three other independent “inventions” of the idea.” His phrasing leads me to think he’s not counting Tsiolkovsky, perhaps because Tsiolkovsky’s version could not have worked. If he includes Pearson as one of the three, there are at least two more inventions of the orbital tower of which I am not aware.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Longest Science Fiction Story Ever Told”
Rocheworld sounds like a hard SF variant of Bob Shaw’s Land and Overland, two planets orbiting close enough to share a common atmosphere.
So that’s a third person writing the same idea at the same time!
There’s also John Brunner’s attempt to follow John Jakes into historicals, The Great Steamboat Race (1983), and George R. R. Martin’s foray into horror, Fevre Dream (1982), both of which drew on the same 19th century steamboat race for inspiration. As I recall, Brunner was not well pleased by the coincidence in subject matter.
@3 Mayhem
Except that if IIRC, Land and Overland are kind of steampunky in feel whereas Bob Forward is like Hal Clement with more orbital mechanics. So the feel of the stories is completely different and use of the setting is not at all alike.
As the state of mankind’s knowledge changes, so does the consensus regarding the universe around us and what is possible. For example, there was a consensus that Venus was a swamp planet and Mars a dying world of fading civilizations, with both of them being inhabited; a consensus that died when we finally sent probes to those planets. For a while, it was power beamed down to Earth by microwaves that fueled the development of colonies at the LaGrange points. Our ideas about extrasolar planets have shifted significantly in recent years. As science makes new discoveries, SF writers flock to them like moths to a flame; it is no surprise that many stories use the same premises.
I seem to remember a solar sail story “Starjammer” appearing in Analog under another name. Was that Anderson using a pen name?
Anderson published Sunjammer under his Winston P. Sanders byline.
My technical ineptitude precludes links but Swamp Venus and Dying Mars weren’t so much scientific concensuses (concenses?) but convenient literary conventions. The available data didn’t support either of them past mmmmaybe the 1930s and probably earlier. As it happens, John Campbell wrote a series of essays about the planets that demonstrated an awareness Mars and such were very unlikely to be habitable, then ignored that information when buying SF stories.
It’s like how modern SF authors make a point of ignoring Einstein, even though Relativity is pretty well established. No ftl makes space opera on a galactic scale too challenging.
Don’t forget Starclimber in the SPBC (Space Elevator Book Count)!
I think “The War of the Worlds” includes dying Mars and swampy Venus, on the grounds that Wellsian or nineteenth century planetary formation produces older planets in further-out orbits, um, somehow. That novel is not the earliest treatment of planetary ecologies, but it had a great impact.
And there was an explanatory essay at the end of “The Fountains of Paradise”, my copy anyway, which covers the same ground, as far as I remember, of which scientists and engineers had previously considered the idea of building up to space – or, as Clarke imagines it, building down from space.
@7 Thanks for that; I suspected a pen name was involved. That story was a favorite of mine when I was a kid.
@8 That point about the Mars/Venus thing being a literary consensus rather than a scientific consensus makes a lot of sense. As does your point about FTL travel; a universe with that speed limit in place is a lot less fun to write about.
@8/JDN
Let’s remember science paints in shades of gray.
In the course of the 20th century, Swamp Venus and Dying Mars gradually became less plausible, and more difficult — though for a long time not impossible — to scientifically justify.
As I recall, Roger Zelazny said he wrote his classic Dying Mars story, “A Rose for Ecclesiastes“ (1963), to take advantage of the last possible moment this scenario could still have a trace of scientific plausibility. (Humans and Martians interbreeding is another matter!)
At science fiction conventions, I’ve had the experience of a panel of SF-writing English majors confidently stating FTL travel is impossible (“because Isaac Asimov said so”), while a panel of SF-writing physicists come up with a half-dozen ways to do it without violating relativity.
I always found the idea of space elevators intriguing. Because of the moon and Mars low gravity, ignoring the cost and getting the materials needed to the locations, our current technology makes one very doable.
Of course this is totally off topic so just ignore me. :)
Some asteroids have fair spins and low delta vees for return orbits to Earth. A long tether could huck stuff at Earth, an idea that has no villainous applications at all.
In the case of space elevators, Ray Cluley’s short story Tethered to the Cold and Dying suggests that there might, just might, be some older narrative roots underfoot.
Spell “consensus” with three esses and one cee. The Latin is one of those pesky fourth declension nouns, so the plural would be “consensus”. (Just like “status”.) The incorrect Latin of course would be the standard “consensii”.
@16 one of those pesky fourth declension nouns
He said declension *flees from schooldays memories screaming*
I don’t know what drove the use of the Saunders pen name. It might have been as simple as “Poul Anderson was insanely prolific and editors had a limit on how many stories they’d buy under his real name in a given period of time.” See Stephen King and Richard Bachman….
I had totally and completely forgotten about the Doom Patrol.
Good article. I had discussions on this subject with my buddy Michael Crichton. He was very aware of the possibility that there was a kind of envelope of emerging technology and that he could be the first person bringing a deeply technical idea to popular attention. For him it was not just a matter of what the tech was (DNA, nano, etc.) but also what kind of “wrapper” you could put it in. Crichton often said to me: “Ok, what is the ‘good version’ of that idea?” By good version he meant the one that millions of people would enjoy and find pleasure in. Several people have claimed J.K. Rowling borrowed or stole the ideas in their books, but there’s no credibility to the claims. Most of what happened was Rowling wrote the good version of the boy wizard idea.
See also Heinlein’s “Friday” and the “Beanstalk”.
Don’t forget Jason Hough’s Dire EarthCycle, starting with THE DARWIN ELEVATOR (2013). :-D
@20 – Walt: Oh, yes, definitely the envelope is the important thing. Not in a “flash over substance”, but the fact that many things have been written about, and new things will be written about by several people at the same time. It’s like giving the same ingredients to several chefs: not all are going to make the same dish, and even if two make the same dish, it’s not going to have the same quality, the same test.
Sort of the opposite of what I was talking about but there are a bizarre number of parallels between Cycle of Fire and The Mote in God’s Eye for two books written decades apart that seem at first glance quite dissimilar:
Both books feature a first contact situation, although with CoF the humans have encountered other intelligent beings before.
Both feature junior officers marooned on a planet, thought to be dead by their superior officers.
Main sequence star in association with a non-main sequence star: in CoF’s case, it’s one of the Pleiades and in MIGE it’s a fictional red giant. In both cases this implies unfortunate things about the long term habitability of the Earthlike world (although as far as I recall, the eventual supernova _didn’t_ cook Mote Prime in the sequel).
Both CoF and MIGE have aliens who are subject to cycles where their civilizations rise and fall. Both have taken steps to mitigate this. In both cases the cycles are caused by factors thought to be outside the aliens’ control. In both cases the aliens are fatalistic about this.
Both have a multiple species civilization, with one species enjoying a position of authority over another. For various reasons, the various species are dependent on each other. The aliens who actually in charge are not particularly sympathetic while the lower-status (and more immediately doomed) aliens are.
In both books, the aliens who are first encountered are seen as potential friends. Later on, something is discovered about them that makes the aliens appear to be a significant threat. As a result, someone proposes a blockade to keep the aliens contained for the good of humanity.
From Clarke’s letter:
Surely the word in the first one should also be fiber, not filter?
> space elevators intriguing. Because of the moon and Mars low gravity
But the Moon’s rotation is soooooo slow — isn’t there a problem with the length of a beanstalk base attached to something turning so slowly? It’d have to be very, very long (calculations are left as an exercise to some more competent reader), wouldn’t it?
@26 A space elevator for the moon would have to reach to the L1 or L2 points, which would be ~ 60000km.
This used to happen in the tabletop games world in the most bizarre ways — three designs in the same summer based on the Trinity test conferring superpowers, for example. Or a game about World War II space combat, of all things, released a few months before mine. The last remnants of the Fat Messiah staff even theorized a “collective subconscious” to explain it.
Well, considering that a lot of the science that sf draws from nowadays is physics-based, and physics is based on calculus, it almost seems like fate that this kind of publishing coincidence would happen over and over again.
After all, there was a similar publishing kerfuffle between Newton and Leibniz, each of which claimed to have invented calculus, and both of whom were right. They accused each other of plagiarism, because let’s face it, everyone wants to be the only one to come up with the Next Big Thing.
This kind of synchronicity happens in all walks of life. Fashion is a great example. I remember an acquaintance researching it. As soon as one season ends (let’s say spring) each fashion deaigner starts working on next year’s spring collection. Each works in the utmost secrecy, yet when they debut their collections at various fashion shows, there’s always common themes.
It gets better. High street brands attend these fashion shows, and they pick designs to duplicate. Being fiercely competitive, again their representatives act in secrecy, trying to identify this season’s trend, while throwing rivals off.
Yet when you walk down the high street, all the shops feature variations on a theme.
Yes, a lot of these will come from the same background, and there is the threat of losing your job if you guess wrong (unfashionable lines don’t sell, so you’ve cost the company money), so a lot play it safe. Yet (like authors simultaneously getting the same idea) it points to some cultural zeitgeist being tapped into..
Synchronicity would have been a great word for me to have used in this essay. Oh, well.
When I was getting stacks of MSes from the SFBC, I used to get runs of the oddest themes, like the six books in a row I got where each book’s protagonist lost one hand thanks to their family’s energetic politics. Less pleasantly, I had a forty-seven book run where all the books used rape as plot parsley.
My writing doesn’t go much beyond Facebook posts, but it’s always vexing when you think of a great word to have used after you’ve written a post. I’d imagine it goes double when you’re writing professionally. Thank you for the kudos. It’s always nice to be complimented on my vocabulary. :)
The limb-loss theme seems remarkably specific. No wonder it stuck in your mind. :)
As for using rape as plot parsley – I can also see why that stuck with you. I’m disturbed just reading that. <sigh> MS 48 was hopefully a welcome relief.
Bingo. People sometimes underestimate the degree to which this happens. Every time I see a cool magazine article and think, “Hey, there’s probably a story here,” I have to assume that dozens of other authors and editors are thinking the same thing. And when you’re talking about such well-traveled roads as space colonies, time-travel, werewolves, or mermaids . . . well, yes, the same idea (“Time-traveling vampire mermaids in space!”) can and will occur to multiple people independently, with no illicit copying required.
Same thing happens in mainstream publishing, btw. Back when I was reading slush for Arbor House, I once received TWO multi-generational family sagas set in Appalachia on the SAME DAY. Nothing sinister there. Just a coincidence.
33, I’m still upset at Brandon Sanderson for his Shardblades, I know he stole it from me back in the 1990s! He’s a thief!
Time-travelling mermaids in space sounds awesome! Sadly I suspect the writing would have to be superb to live up to my hope… and a quick google doesn’t seem to turn up anything <sigh>.
Queue a bunch of stories arriving shortly… :)
There’s a mystery genre whose members share so many details I have to think the authors in question are deliberately testing to see how much variation you can pack into a specific formula. All of the examples are about divorced or widowed women who give up big city careers to move to a small town where they get a job in a small business, find a new and better boyfriend or husband, adopt or foster a kid, and solve murders on the side. Despite the specific formula, the books are quite distinctive (in stark contrast to the week when I kept confusing the two milsf books about how genocide is OK if its aimed at militaristic space lizard books I was sent).
Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross is set in deep space, it features mermaids, and the plot involves not time travel but Time in a way that I cannot summarize well without spoilers.
sdzald writes:
“I always found the idea of space elevators intriguing. Because of the moon and Mars low gravity, ignoring the cost and getting the materials needed to the locations, our current technology makes one very doable.”
This is a common notion that lunar and Mars Clarke towers are doable with existing materials like Zylon.
I look at a lunar elevator as well as a Zylon Mars elevator.
The lunar beanstalk is one of my early elevator articles which assumed a safety factor of one. With this razor thin safety factor the slightest nick would cause a break. No sane entity would trust human lives or valuable payloads on this safety margin.
A safety factor of three is much more sensible. With this safety factor neither a lunar nor a Mars Zylon elevator are plausible.
@37- Tamfang – yes, technically true. I enjoyed Neptune’s Brood, but I’m not sure I’d say it was a book about space-faring mermaids. They do use bodies that are (to all intents and purposes) mermaids, but it raises interesting questions about is that enough to call them mermaids? After all, any physical features in that background are mutable. The consciousness discards the humanoid bipedal model body and dons the mermaid type almost as easily as we decide to change clothes. The also regard themselves as evolved humans, not mermaids, so there’s no mermaid society, culture or history. So is merely having the body of a mermaid for part of the story enough to qualify
The Roche Lobe is referenced more recently in a Miles From Tomorrowland episode, Ocean in Motion. Despite the fact that they have NASA advisors. I was convinced thT two planets sharing an ocean was totally impossible was impossible till just now, when I looked up Roche lobes. :)
I stumbled over another example: Both James P. Hogan’s Thrice Upon a Time and Gregory Benford’s Timescape involve sending messages back through time. Both also involve an environmental catastrophe. They were published only months apart.
@41: Both Timescape and Thrice Upon a Time involve scientists in the UK sending messages back in time that end up influencing events in California.
I never saw space elevators as being anything more than an interesting intellectual exercise. Developing a concept is a long way from making it work in the real world. I have a feeling that tidal effects would have a big enough impact on a space elevator that it would only work in theory; the construct would be very fragile, and it would be difficult to dampen vibrations once they start.
Many years ago I read a novel that featured the building of 3(?) space elevators, that work just fine until ecoterrorists release carbon eating nanobots into the tower based in Peru. I recall it being an engineering heavy, quite believable story, and I remember really enjoying it at the time. I can’t for the life of me remember the title or author, but I’d like to read it again. Any help fellow readers?
Many years ago I read a novel that featured the building of 3(?) space elevators, that work just fine until ecoterrorists release carbon eating nanobots into the tower based in Peru. I recall it being an engineering heavy, quite believable story, and I remember really enjoying it at the time. I can’t for the life of me remember the title or author, but I’d like to read it again. Any help fellow readers? And this preview flick captcha post flick “this is a duplicate of a previous comment” without flick posting is VERY annoying.
8: The Latin plural of consensus, if anyone wants to know, is consensūs.
Synchronicity also seems to happen sometimes with (disaster) movies. Released in 1997 were both Dante’s Peak and Volcano. And just one year later, in 1998: Armageddon and Deep Impact.
47: not just disaster films; Independence Day and Mars Attacks were both 1996. Pirates of the Caribbean and Master and Commander were both 2003. Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine both started in 1993.
Don’t forget about Robin Hood (1991) and Robin Hood:Prince of Thieves being made at the same time. Obviously everyone does forget that Uma Thurman played Maid Marion….