Science fiction is often about discovering new things. Sometimes it is also about loss. Consider, for example, the SF authors of the early space probe era. On the plus side, after years of writing about Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and the other worlds of the Solar System, they would find out what those worlds were really like. On the minus side, all the infinite possibilities would be replaced by a single reality—one that probably wouldn’t be much like the Solar System of the old pulp magazines.
Not that science fiction’s consensus Old Solar System, featuring dying Mars and Martians, or swamp world Venus, was ever plausible. Even in the 1930s, educated speculations about the other planets were not optimistic about the odds that the other worlds were so friendly as to be merely dying. (Don’t believe me? Sample John W. Campbell’s articles from the mid-1930s.)
Science fiction authors simply ignored what science was telling them in pursuit of thrilling stories.
If an author was very, very unlucky, that old Solar System might be swept away before a work depending on an obsolete model made it to print. Perhaps the most famous example was due to radar technology deployed at just the wrong time. When Larry Niven’s first story, “The Coldest Place,” was written, the scientific consensus was that Mercury was tide-locked, one face always facing the sun, and one always facing away. The story relies on this supposed fact. By the time it was published, radar observation had revealed that Mercury actually had a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance. Niven’s story was rendered obsolete before it even saw print.
Space probe schedules are known years in advance. It would be easy to plan around the flyby dates to ensure stories were not undermined as Niven’s was.
Authors did not always bother. Podkayne of Mars, for example, was serialized in Worlds of If from November 1962 to March 1963. In December 1962, Mariner 2 revealed a Venus nothing like Heinlein’s, well before the novel was fully serialized.
An impending deadline imposed by a probe approaching another world could be inspirational. Roger Zelazny reportedly felt that he could not continue writing stories set on the Mars of the old planetary romances once space probes had revealed Mars as it is. The Soviet Mars 1 failed on route to Mars in March 1963, buying Zelazny a little time, but more probes would no doubt come. Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” depicting a fateful encounter between an arrogant Earthman and seemingly doomed Martians, saw print in November 1963. Mariner 4 revealed Mars to the Earth in July 1965. Zelazny’s tale may not be the final pre-Mariner 4 story to see print, but it’s probably the most significant just-barely-pre-Mariner story set on Mars.
At least two sets of editors decided to fast forward through the Kubler-Ross model, zipping past denial, anger, bargaining, and depression straight on to acceptance. Raging against the loss of the Old Solar System won’t make the Old Solar System return. Faced with new information about Venus, Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison decided to publish 1968’s Farewell, Fantastic Venus, which collected short pieces, essays, and excerpts of longer works that the pair felt comprised the best of the pre-probe tales.
Farewell, Fantastic Venus gave the impression of grognards reluctantly acknowledging change. Frederik and Carol Pohl’s 1973 Jupiter took a more positive tack, celebrating Pioneers 10 and 11 with an assortment of classic SF stories about old Jupiter. I prefer the Pohls’ approach, which may be why I prefer Jupiter to Farewell, Fantastic Venus. Or perhaps it’s just that the stories in Jupiter are superior to those in Farewell, Fantastic Venus. Plus it had that great Berkey cover.
The glorious flood of information from advanced space probes and telescopes does not seem likely to end any time soon, which means there is still time to write stories and edit anthologies powered by the friction between the universe as it is and as we dreamed it might be. Not just in the increasingly wondrous Solar System, but also neighbouring stellar systems about which we know increasingly more. Celebrate the new Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, and Barnard’s Star with the best stories of the old.
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 a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
Aside from the _Rocheworld_ series (the first few books of which I quite enjoyed) what other Barnard’s Star titles does anyone recall? None sprang to mind for me (but see wikipedia link below pointing out how little I know).
(Huh, looks like I missed quite a few, and forgot some I’ve read that are set there.)
Any recommendations for post-exoplanet boom SF?
reat article, so much out there, and here to discover![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
My asteroid-based novel Only Superhuman (from Tor) came out in 2012, between the Dawn probe’s arrivals at the asteroids Vesta and Ceres. The timing was just good enough to let me add a couple of references to newly discovered Vestan geography in the copyedit phase of the novel, but I was fearful that Dawn might contradict my portrayal of Ceres when it finally got there in 2015. Fortunately, the theories I’d based my portrayal on (that Ceres had an icy composition) turned out to be correct. Which made me luckier than the authors of the Expanse series, which started a year before Only Superhuman came out. They went with the alternate theory of Ceres being dry and rocky, with the Ceres colony’s need to import water being a significant plot point, and Dawn proved them wrong. (Although they got a bunch of sequel novels and a hit TV series and I didn’t, so “luckier” is a relative thing…)
I think the biggest outdated conception of recent times is that the Solar system is typical of planetary systems in general. Most SF has tended to portray exoplanetary systems as being arranged pretty much the same as ours, with a few rocky inner planets and a few outer gas giants at spacings similar to ours. Now we know our system is apparently atypical.
@2/noblehunter: Lockstep by Karl Schroeder (also from Tor) comes to mind. It’s set in a future where humans have colonized the numerous rogue planets that are now believed to exist in nearby interstellar space, which are easier to reach than planets around other stars.
Apparently Fred Pohl loved out-of-date Mercury stories — “The Coldest Place” was first published in If in December 1964, but another story set on a tide-locked Mercury, “The Mercurymen”, by C. C. MacApp, was published a whole year later, in Galaxy for December 1965.
And similarly Avram Davidson at F&SF must have had an affinity for “Farewell to Old Mars” stories, as he first published Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” in November 1963, then, about a year later, published Leigh Brackett’s farewell to her most famous setting with “Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon”, in the October 1964 F&SF.
(Of course, there are still Old Mars and Old Venus stories being published — in fact, Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin published two anthologies of new stories set on the old versions of those planets: Old Mars in 2013, and Old Venus in 2015. No plans for an Old Mercury or Old Jupiter anthology, alas!)
I could have done this whole essay as examples of Kubler-Ross.
I’ve encountered not so long ago a review of a work that embodied denial (it’s set in a pre-Space Probe system with Martians and Venusians, which for some reason meant lit fic wasn’t successful; the causality on that was unclear) where the review embodied anger, in the sense that the reviewer thought space probes had ruined the Solar System.
This jogged my memory of when I socialized with Alastair Reynolds at Capclave 2015 (a real good guy) and he talked about how even though he had been a working scientist there was no point in letting science get in the way of a good story. Though there was always the point where you had to give up the old visions for new realities.
@6/James Davis Nicoll: “it’s set in a pre-Space Probe system with Martians and Venusians, which for some reason meant lit fic wasn’t successful; the causality on that was unclear”
If you mean that SF literature wasn’t successful in the book’s universe, maybe it’s the same thinking behind Watchmen, where the presence of real superheroes means that superhero comics never caught on and pirate comics are the big thing instead.
Which is a logic I can’t really agree with, because there were always comics in other genres besides superheroes, including Westerns, war comics, romance comics, teen humor comics like Archie and Patsy Walker, and detective/crime comics like Slam Bradley. So there were always comics about real-life subject matter, and thus there’s no reason to think that real-life superheroes would preclude the existence of superhero comics.
I also remember reading a fair number of books back in the day (Alan E. Nourse’s Scavengers in Space being a prime example) (n.b. Even back in the day when I was reading them, the books were already pretty old) in which it was assumed that the asteroid belt was, in fact, debris from a destroyed planet (possibly inhabited; possibly destroyed by its inhabitants), rather than just a bunch of unclaimed stellar junk.
IIRC, Zelazny’s story “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” does for an impending Venus what “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” did for Mars.
8: Other way round: the presence of life on Mars and Venus meant nobody read books like Tropic of Cancer, To Kill A Mocking Bird, Catcher in the Rye, or The Bell Jar. For some reason. It was almost like the author was sucking up to their audience with promises that if only certain extremely unrealistic events had occurred, science fiction would be more popular.
10: I don’t know if you were on rec.arts.sf.written when I did the sfbc reviews and had to admit over and over and over I had not (yet) read Rose. I still have not read Lamps.
In Diane Duane’s A Wizard of Mars (2010) a SIG of Earth’s wizards (notably but not exclusively the protagonists of the “Young Wizards” series) are investigating Mars (arid, nearly-airless, modern-conception) because of anomalies in its magical makeup, and discover that it did indeed once host a more favorable environment and intelligent life — which, for complicated reasons, is humanoid and shows cultural similarities to Burroughs’s Barsoomians. Among the human characters’ challenges are concealing their activities from various operative orbiters and rovers.
The book also notes, in passing, that the rovers, their solar panels threatened by dust accumulation, benefit not just from fortuitous whirlwinds, but also from wizards with cans of compressed air.
7: I once told an author looking for advice because their story had been upset by the recent description of the planets in that system that just because an exosystem looked one way didn’t mean the author couldn’t tweak the system and still tell the story they wanted. After all, Earth’s geography is pretty much established at this point, and there’s no Skull Island or Henders Island, yet stories can still have them and no one thinks twice that such places don’t really exist. So if you want to drop a habitable planet in the Goldilocks Zone when it’s been established there isn’t a properly size one there…so what?
If anything, the huge variety of exoplanets and their systems means you have even more freedom to create interesting places that aren’t simply slight variations of the Solar System.
@14/Keith Morrison: Like how Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise moved Sri Lanka to the equator (and renamed it Taprobane, but kept its history and culture intact), so that it could plausibly be the anchor point for a space elevator. It was blatantly an alternate world, but a necessary one for the story he wanted to tell.
Technically Hal Clement’s Misson of Gravity is an example of this. It’s inspired by an enormous planet that was thought to orbit 61 Cygni A at the time, but was disproved after the story was published. I think these problems are getting rarer in written SF. We’ve had lots of major astronomical discoveries in the last ten years, but the only example of anything getting “disproved” by them I can think of is the dry Ceres thing mentioned in post 4.
14: You can always pick up the Mars or Venus that want and stick it in another system.
17: That was Leigh Brackett’s solution, more or less.
Not to mention the missing Counter-Earth of Gor and other works!
Taprobane is not a new invention, it is a name from old maps. Using that name just signals that your world looks like those old maps.
I love reading old science fiction just to see what they got wrong and right. Remember Life in the 21st century speculative future,even Walter Cronkite was wrong a lot of the time
Tanith Lee had a planet in another solar system that fulfilled Terrans’ ideas for what Mars should have been like so well that they named it New Mars.
John C. Wright’s Orphans of Chaos trilogy says that a Mars with an ancient civilization and everything else we’ve ever dreamed of is there. It’s just that there are different systems of reality. We’re the poor, unlucky suckers who can only perceive the Mars-is-a-dead-rock reality.
I’m for just saying the heck with it. Mars has ancient civilizations, and Venus is covered with swamps. The asteroids are the bones of vanished Lucifer. Also, giant, intelligent manta rays are swimming around on Jupiter. Reality has never been a good enough reason to ignore a great story.
@19/zdamien: “Counter-Earth” stories (Gor was hardly the first) don’t really fit the category, because they never would’ve been considered scientifically plausible. It was known at least as far back as the 1820s, when Neptune’s existence was predicted based on irregularities in Uranus’s orbit, that an unknown planet could be detected by its gravitational effect on the motions of other planets, and thus a “Counter-Earth” could not be hidden behind the Sun.
20/birgit: I never said Clarke invented the name Taprobane. Clarke does explain the name’s historical origins in the afterword of the book, after all.
S M Stirling did a nice couple of novels about alternate-universe Mars and Venus, including a scene at a bar near a Con with many of the big-name SF writers of the day watching the first probes land on Mars to be greeted by the natives.
These were much more realistic, in my opinion, than many of the “old Mars” and “old Venus” stories, because the natives were shown as much more complex individuals. I’m sorry I can’t recall the titles at the moment.
I seem to recall that The Worm Ourobouros, by E.R. Eddison, was putatively set on Venus…
@25 — Mercury, although I don’t think Eddison even tried to pretend it was our Mercury.
@26 – ah, right, it’s been a while since I read it, although I love this book – thanks!
@27 — You’re welcome! And me, too!
I like the old solar system of our imagination much more than the one we ended up with. That being said, I have great respect for those who strive to “play with the nets up,” and fit their stories into the real world.
@29/Alan: I think the real Solar system is more interesting. The old fantasy versions of Venus, Mars, etc. were just slight variations on familiar Earth environments. The pre-modern SF version of Jupiter at least attempted to be exotic with high gravity and superdense atmosphere, but it still showed the limits of our imagination in that it assumed the planet had a solid surface at all. The real discoveries were so much more surprising and bizarre and wondrous than anything we imagined before.
@29-30: I’m undecided. On the one hand, I like bizarre. On the other hand, it would comfort me greatly if there were some more planets where plants and animals could exist.
@31/Jana: There’s always the possibility of life in the subsurface oceans of Europa, Enceladus, and similar moons. Arthur C. Clarke offered a fascinating look at a potential Europan ecosystem in the novel 2010: Odyssey Two. And Carl Sagan’s Cosmos offered an interesting conjectural ecosystem of floating creatures in Jupiter’s cloud layers. Meanwhile, it would be theoretically possible for microbial life to exist in Venus’s upper atmosphere where the temperature and pressure allow liquid water to exist. We could build floating cities in such an environment, because an Earthlike oxygen-nitrogen mix is less dense than the carbon dioxide atmosphere at that altitude and thus would be a lifting gas. (I portrayed just such a scenario on a Venus-like exoplanet in my recent Star Trek: The Captain’s Oath.)
32: If I remember, Clarke has a long afterword in one of the Odyssey books explaining that the sequels depended on new probe information. He planned to write 2061 after the Galileo results came back, but the launch was delayed, so he wrote it based on Giotto findings instead; 3001 was the post-Galileo novel.
Tanith Lee had a planet in another solar system that fulfilled Terrans’ ideas for what Mars should have been like so well that they named it New Mars.
As did Ken MacLeod, in The Stone Canal.
After all, Earth’s geography is pretty much established at this point, and there’s no Skull Island or Henders Island, yet stories can still have them and no one thinks twice that such places don’t really exist
I’d argue that stories set in non-existent geography are getting rarer in general, and it’s not just because we now know those places can’t possibly exist – it’s because they’ve gone out of fashion. Look at superheroes: who would think, today, of inventing a major city like Metropolis or Gotham to put their superhero story in? You’d put him in an existing one. Who’d write a serious novel today set in Ruritania, or Zangaro, or Parador, or Isola?
@33/ajay: There’s still plenty of fiction set in imaginary locales — e.g. the title town of the TV series Eureka, or Castle Rock in Stephen King’s fiction, or Neptune in Veronica Mars, etc. And you still see fictional countries from time to time too, like Qumar in The West Wing, or various countries in political shows like Designated Survivor or adventure shows like Scorpion. It’s often preferable to use an imaginary location to avoid offending anyone in the real city/country and risking possible lawsuits (e.g. if your story involves the heroes fighting a corrupt city government or a terrorist-backing regime) — or just if the story you need to tell requires a city or country with attributes that don’t exist in any real place.
True, and agreed that there are always good reasons to have fictional cities/countries/universities/warships/whatever in fiction, but my vague impression is that there’s less than there used to be. Are people still inventing cities for their newly-created superhero comics? I’m not a huge comic reader, but it’s my impression that, unless they’re tied to a fictional city for continuity reasons (obviously if you invent a new character in the Batman universe, they have to live in Gotham), you put them in a real city.
@35/ajay: When it comes to comics, you can’t really generalize; it’s always depended on the comic and the creator. While DC tended to use fictional cities like Metropolis, Gotham, Central City, and so on, Marvel prided itself on pretending to be “the world outside your window” and using real locations like New York City. Yet Marvel’s “real-world” policy tended to be limited to the US, since it had a wealth of imaginary foreign locations like Latveria, Wakanda, Madripoor, etc. And DC did some things set in real locations too, like the NYC-based New Teen Titans or the semi-infamous “Justice League Detroit” era that spawned a surprising number of future Arrowverse characters (Vixen, Vibe, Gypsy, Steel).
As for modern stuff, I assume there’s still a similar mix of real and imaginary. It’s not like every creator is required to follow some industry-wide set of rules or something.
Fair enough. What about other genres, though? Do people still write thrillers about non-existent countries, as Conrad and Frederick Forsyth and Anthony Hope did?
@37/ajay: Well, as I mentioned, there are still TV shows that invent fictional foreign countries, so I’d be surprised if there weren’t still novels that did the same. Yes, there’s probably more use of real locations in fiction than there was 50 years ago, but that doesn’t mean fictional locations have completely ceased to be used. It would be done if there were a reason for doing it.
@33 — Heck, R. Garcia y Robertson had a planet in another Solar System that fit a certain author’s perceptions of what Mars might be like that it was called New Barsoom! :)
38: I mean, I could do my own research but it’s so much easier just to assert something and wait for other people to tell me why I’m wrong.
“Charles and I are a team. I make imbecile suggestions and he does the hard work of elaborately disproving them. Then we arrive at the truth by a process of elimination and the world says ‘My God! What intuition that young man has!’ “
Come to think of it, Canadian sit coms like imaginary towns like Dog River, Saskatchewan, and Mercy, also Saskatchewan. Note for the record: there are real communities in Saskatchewan. It’s not just there to keep Manitoba from chaffing on Alberta.
For a geologist, the real system is probably more interesting than “jungle Venus”, though that could go either way. For a biologist, places that had alien life would be more interesting. For a storyteller, places that already had life, and intelligent life, would be way more interesting.
@42/zdamien: Yeah, but if the alien biomes are just slight variations on familiar Earth biomes — like jungles and dinosaurs on Venus — that’s not as interesting or imaginative as a truly alien biosphere, e.g. a Venus-type world populated by creatures with an exotic hot-planet biology based on carbon-carbon covalent bonds in a liquid sulfur solvent, with their primary senses being infrared and echolocation (see my recent Star Trek: The Captain’s Oath). A fictional environment doesn’t have to be Earthlike in order to support intelligent life.
Or maybe “Earthlike” is the wrong word, since there are environments on Earth that are very alien to us. Consider the giant squids that live deep in the ocean, in perpetual darkness under crushing pressures. We now understand that octopus and squids might have an intelligence comparable to our own, one that they’re unable to develop as far because they simply don’t live long enough. So in theory, the lightless ocean depths are conducive to supporting intelligent life with complex manipulative ability. And there are multiple moons and dwarf planets in our system that have subglacial oceans — it’s possible that there are far more such worlds in the galaxy than there are planets like Earth with warm surface temperatures and oxygen atmospheres. So if we assume that only worlds with surface conditions like ours can host life and intelligence, we might be looking in the wrong places. We might be more the exception than the rule.
@43
Alan Dean Foster’s “Sentenced To Prism” has a very imaginative biome, which humans(and others) are completely unable to cope with at first.
Re: footnote #2 – I thought that SF was supposed to be predictive. What’s the matter with these authors (pre-2003)? The’ve been slacking!
@12/James Davis Nicoll. “Rose…” was outstanding! If you’re still waiting to read it, please do!
The Space Trilogy (Perelanda, Out of the Silent Planet, That Hideous Strength) was never accurate, but then, it was allegory, so CS Lewis gets a psss.
What’s the story that has a city mounted on rails around Mercury, so that the thermal expansion of the rails keeps the city always just behind the sunrise line? A nifty concept that you can’t have on Old Mercury.
noblehunter (2): Writers have traditionally assumed that most stars have planets (including at least one habitable), so what differences do you see post “exoplanet boom”? Okay I haven’t seen a Hot Jupiter in fiction.
ChristopherLBennett (4): Expanse could solve that (and launch a fan war) by dubbing some other name over “Ceres”.
zdrakec, hoopmanjh (25,26): Given how Eddison abandoned Lessingham and the martlet after a few pages, maybe he also abandoned Mercury?
@46/Tamfang: There’s a Mercurian city on rails, called Terminator, in several of Kim Stanley Robinson’s works, including Blue Mars and 2312. Charles Stross’s Saturn’s Children has one of the same name. I’m pretty sure I’ve read at least one story or novel where an equivalent city was on giant caterpillar treads or something.
As for The Expanse, I suppose they could replace Ceres with Vesta, which is the only other Main Belt body anywhere close to it in size and is relatively water-poor, although hydrated materials have been detected on it. But they’ve been calling it “Ceres” for three seasons now, so it’s too late to change.
H. Beam Piper’s Uller Uprising had an Earth-similar environment ( a little cold, I think), but an ecosystem that was based on silicon instead of carbon. There was an afterward that explained much about the chemical inter-actions. Not being a biologist or chemist, I have no idea if it would actually work that way. Nevertheless, it was interesting.
@8/ChristopherLBennet
There was the superhero movie Zoom with superhero comics
To be honest, I couldn’t care less about any of this. Science fiction can, and usually does, feature fictional science. If the story is worth telling, it will be worth reading. People who insist on “no outdated SF” are cheating themselves of outstanding literature in the name of intellectual snobbery.
@46, @47: “Star Wars – Heir to the Empire” keeps up the theme of sense-of-wonder locations with “Nomad City” on Nkllon, a pseudo Mercury where mining was carried out by NoCit on the night side – a Lando Calrissian production. https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Nomad_City
“built from an old Dreadnaught-class heavy cruiser, which was mounted on top of forty captured AT-AT walkers” – war surplus.
Sure. There’s a current romance series, Reluctant Royals, by Alyssa Cole that has an imaginary African nation (I think of it as Romance Wakanda) and an imaginary tiny European nation, from which the girl and guy in the third book hale, respectively. It avoids a lot of the problems the 2nd book had, where the girl met the guy in Scotland and he turned out to be the Duke of Edinburgh.
Making up a country means you don’t have to worry about details like that. (That title is already is use by someone unlikely to appear as the guy in a romance novel.)
@47:
@46/Tamfang: There’s a Mercurian city on rails, called Terminator, in several of Kim Stanley Robinson’s works, including Blue Mars and 2312.
And also in The Memory of Whiteness, one of his earliest novels.
The giant, intelligent manta rays fly among the clouds of Saturn where Robert L. Forward put them in “Saturn Rukh”. ;)
Cloud cities on Saturn would be a far easier proposition than on Jupiter because Saturn doesn’t spew deadly radiation. A movie based on Michael McCollum’s “The Clouds of Saturn” would have to handwave away a bit of scientific rigor due to the heliox atmosphere that has to be maintained in the living quarters of the cities and airships because our normal nitrox atmosphere is too heavy. Airship gas envelopes and the upper layer of city envelopes are filled with nuclear reactor heated hydrogen to produce enough lift to stay within the altitude range of pressure and temperature tolerable by humans. An oxygen supply and protective clothing makes it possible to survive without a sealed environment suit. The novel plays it straight with the effects of breathing heliox. Everyone’s voices are pitch shifted up, and everyone is used to it because at the time of the novel there’s nobody alive who lived on Earth before the Sun flared up. The book does make note of whenever anyone encounters a normal Earth air mix they think it’s weird that the pitch of their voice drops. But to do an entire movie or TV series with everyone doing chipmunk voices would have the audience rolling in the aisles.
Roger MacBride Allen’s “Hunted Earth” series has become a victim of progress thanks to long range observations showing Pluto has more than one moon, and the New Horizons flyby. Would be nice if he’d do an updated version of the first two books to include the new knowledge of the Plutonian system, and get off his arse and write the third book we’ve been waiting on for 25 years.
In my head canon, John Carter was astrally projected into Mars of a long, long, time ago, hehe, when Mars was still habitable and Earth yet to be. As for other fiction that got their astrography wrong or uncorrected, I just assume that they happened in an alternate universe. Trying to be too nitpicky slows down my reading or enjoyment to the extent I might not read them. Otherwise even faster-than-light travel or smooth spaceship ascent and descent could get on my nerves.
#46,#47, #52 — The first version of KSR’s Mercury city called Terminator that I recall is the story “Mercurial”, published in Universe 15 in 1985, about the same time as The Memory of Whiteness. I’m not sure if “Mercurial”‘s Terminator is in the same “future history” as The Memory of Whiteness or not.
He really seems to like that idea, and who can blame him?
@55/ecbatan: Well, it’s the Terminator. So of course it’ll be back.
I recall reading some sort of introduction from Zelazny regarding “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” and “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” admitting that he was fortunate to get his stories out just under the wire, so to speak.
Harry Turtledove named his fourth planet “Minerva” in A World of Difference. It’s about the same size as Earth, of course colder, but not as cold as even Old Mars because of the moderate greenhouse effect.
When I updated H. Beam Piper’s classic story “Omnilingual” (because there are so few SF stories where the science is linguistic archaeology, and dammit, it’s just obsolete enough to be painful for me to read), I took a leaf from Turtledove and renamed Piper’s Old Mars “Ares”. Presumably this means that the other planets are Hermes, Aphrodite, etc. I changed a bunch of other small things to make it more plausible that the story is set 50 years from now instead of 50 years from 1956.
(An example of an update not mentioned in the introduction: One of Piper’s characters is named Selim von Ohlmhorst and is called a “Turco-German”. His mother must have had great force of character to have him given an Arabic name in Turkish form despite being married to a member of the old German nobility. Reflecting the huge number of Turks in Germany today, I changed the epithet to “German Turk”. Only today did I learn that Turks in Germany go back to the 18C, though the big influx didn’t start until the 1960s.)
C S Lewis’s description of Venus as being habitable I read back in the late 60s. It was quite the norm back then.
@58 Most characters in Piper’s future history are descended from South Americans or Africans who survived the atomic wars that destroyed the northern hemisphere, or people who fled south during the wars. So there are a lot of characters in his stories with names that reflect the mixing of people from different nations and cultures.
@@@@@ 32, ChriistopherLBennett:
@@@@@31/Jana: There’s always the possibility of life in the subsurface oceans of Europa, Enceladus, and similar moons. Arthur C. Clarke offered a fascinating look at a potential Europan ecosystem in the novel 2010: Odyssey Two.
Eric Flint and Ryk E Spoor’s Portal finds a working ecosystem in the ice-capped ocean of Europa.
The good news for writers willing to hand-wave FTL:
New research suggests there are five to ten billion Earth like planets, in their local Goldilocks zone, in the Milky Way Galaxy.
https://www.sciencealert.com/there-could-be-up-to-10-billion-warm-and-watery-earth-like-planets-in-our-galaxy?fbclid=IwAR0NvXuHRxCOVA6CfXXsE-2YCaV0clJyGtwoj1Rpwrb1t9nG56xx-Db1K_Q