Before the Space Age the planets, moons and asterioids of our solar system were largely abodes of mystery. A few things were known, or thought to be known. From that scanty body of knowledge arose a rich sf literature in which these mysterious bodies acquired personalities, characters, which in some cases transcended the particular stories in which they figured. That is to say, conventional depictions became established, a kind of common stock for writers. The Burroughs Mars and the Brackett Mars - for example - though very different from one another, can both be seen as variations on one huge theme. Then came the real-life discoveries of the Space Age and I suggest that in literature a big mistake sprang from this. It was almost always decided that no more stories could or should be set in the old, disproved Solar System. I suggest that the Old Solar System (OSS) has acquired enough literary reality to persist. For example, those publishers who told Leigh Brackett that it was no good her writing any more Low Canal Mars stories were, I think, wrong. And what about the good old Twilight Belt of Mercury? Pity to let that go. Any reactions? Other themes for the thread: the extent of the OSS in literature. Anyone know of tales set on Uranus? (I am trying to write some myself and would do well to know.) Any tales set on the Moon in an ancient past, when it was inhabited? - (apart from Jack Williamson's classic, "The Moon Era").
The Old Solar System
- Thread starter Zendexor
- Start date
Dennis E. Taylor
Destroying Worlds Since 2015
Remember Captain Future? In Edmond Hamilton's universe, every planet in the solar system was habitable and had natives who were all basically anthropomorphic. The Great Red Spot was explained as the biggest active volcano caldera in the universe.
Tom Hering
Rememberer
Well, SF gained respectability when it left pulp concepts behind and - thanks to John W. Campbell - focused instead on scientific plausibility. But SF is, first and foremost, fiction. So yes, why not new stories set in the OSS? They would be no different than fantasy stories that take place in a contemporary setting - a setting in which science has disproved a magical view of the world around us. So we're really talking Science Fantasy stories rather than Science Fiction stories.
Ray McCarthy
Sentient Marmite: The Truth may make you fret.
Maybe their imagination wasn't big enough and many were simply Rider Haggard / Edgar Rice Burroughs / Capt. W.E. Johns in Space?
(Two of those DID write Mars stories, and Johns are 'interesting'). EE Doc Smith and others in 1930s did have worlds on other stars.
Add Interstellar travel and there could be a billion to 20 billion worlds with life and maybe 2,000 to 200,000 Technically Advanced Civilisations in our Galaxy*.
It turns out there may be good convergent evolutionary reasons (or God, take your pick!) for two eyes that look forward on head at top, four limbs, fingers with at least one opposable so you can grasp. But no especial reason to rule out marsupial or egg type creatures in favour of placental mammal types.
So you can have your 'OSS' either as quarantined worlds (Telepathic contact?) or with only Generation Ships** or one unlikely thing***, Jump Drive (more likely can only work in Deep Space if at all). Instead of only 10 there are maybe 1 Billion to choose and a variety of plausible suns.
Too small and solar flares fry your folk as smaller stars have worse ones and the planet has to be closer. Too big and the Star has too much solar radiation and Ultraviolet even in the far edge of Goldilocks zone.
Planet size can be a big smaller (too small and it can't hold air) to maybe 3x surface area Super Earth (but that's not x3 gravity!).
(* Radio contact isn't actually feasible really beyond 5 to 10 light years for various reasons, spectroscopic analysis may reveal civilisations inside next 20 years with better space based instruments)
(**A Generation ship is probably just about feasible even today, a huge adventure for the great great grandchildren or boring and high risk?)
(***Was it A.C. Clarke that suggested SF should only have one unlikely thing? Star Trek is less plausible than the OSS stories in many ways!)
(Two of those DID write Mars stories, and Johns are 'interesting'). EE Doc Smith and others in 1930s did have worlds on other stars.
Add Interstellar travel and there could be a billion to 20 billion worlds with life and maybe 2,000 to 200,000 Technically Advanced Civilisations in our Galaxy*.
It turns out there may be good convergent evolutionary reasons (or God, take your pick!) for two eyes that look forward on head at top, four limbs, fingers with at least one opposable so you can grasp. But no especial reason to rule out marsupial or egg type creatures in favour of placental mammal types.
So you can have your 'OSS' either as quarantined worlds (Telepathic contact?) or with only Generation Ships** or one unlikely thing***, Jump Drive (more likely can only work in Deep Space if at all). Instead of only 10 there are maybe 1 Billion to choose and a variety of plausible suns.
Too small and solar flares fry your folk as smaller stars have worse ones and the planet has to be closer. Too big and the Star has too much solar radiation and Ultraviolet even in the far edge of Goldilocks zone.
Planet size can be a big smaller (too small and it can't hold air) to maybe 3x surface area Super Earth (but that's not x3 gravity!).
(* Radio contact isn't actually feasible really beyond 5 to 10 light years for various reasons, spectroscopic analysis may reveal civilisations inside next 20 years with better space based instruments)
(**A Generation ship is probably just about feasible even today, a huge adventure for the great great grandchildren or boring and high risk?)
(***Was it A.C. Clarke that suggested SF should only have one unlikely thing? Star Trek is less plausible than the OSS stories in many ways!)
Yes I enjoyed Captain Future (I have ten or twelve of the books, I think). I remember ordering them from America and waiting with enormous excitement for the first two to arrive. I was a bit disappointed by the anthropomorphism. But the aquatic Neptunians, as I recall, were less so than most. Incidentally, in the way one makes excuses for authors one likes, one could invent a theory of archetypes or racial subconscious to explain why Captain Future's Neptune was largely ocean and his Saturn was agricultural... The Saturn book had a ridiculously irrelevant title: Galaxy Mission.
Hadn't thought of it that way but I suppose you're right: SF in this context means Science Fantasy - an interesting quasi-oxymoron. Another point: the rights and wrongs of deliberate anachronism in literature can be compared to similar debates in architecture. I'm on the same side in both.
Your general point maybe is that treatments of the OSS were often disappointing, and that opportunities for world-building are bound to be far greater in extra-solar settings. I agree on both counts. But the narrower literary alley provided by our neighbouring worlds can also be infinite in its own way, and of a particular character which cannot be found elsewhere: as "first love" is special, so perhaps is "first frontier". It is however debatable whether this special wonder can be felt by anyone too young to remember the days before the modern surge in planetary science. I was born in 1954 and can remember when the Moon was unattainable. I have the best of both worlds: the old sense of mystery and the fascination with the new knowledge. I have an old encyclopaedia with 1950s artists' renderings of the surfaces of the Moon and planets, awesome to me as a child, and all quite inaccurate; I have retained the awe while adding the corrective. But can youngsters access these perceptions?
Ray McCarthy
Sentient Marmite: The Truth may make you fret.
I think you can have the same characters and plots (essentially) on any worlds. It wasn't that these were IN the solar system that made them special or enjoyable.
Wernher von Braun was born March 23, 1912 and by 1930s he'd worked on Liquid hydrogen rocket motors and was planing a Mars mission. Later in 1960s Kennedy decided the Moon was enough, so though Wernher von Braun was pleased in 1969, he'd have been disappointed it wasn't a Mars mission.
When was your encyclopaedia printed?
You can have what ever worlds you like. Still. Even when many of these Solar System stories were written, scientists and astronomers knew the reality. As to why Martian Chronicles or Capt/ WE Johns stories were on Mars rather than around another star I've no idea. C.S. Lewis knew (and was told before published) that the Mars and Venus in his stories was fantasy, but in a way that was part of the point. He'd claimed most Scientificition (as some people called it then) was rubbish and was challenged to write some.
Why didn't Ancient Romans discover and Exploit the Americas? Economics, not lack of technology!
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Tom Hering
Rememberer
As pointed out in articles on the subject at Wikipedia and Science Fiction Encyclopedia, the term "Science Fantasy" is itself an anachronism. (Sorry I don't have enough posts yet to include links to those articles here.) The term had some currency in the 1950s and '60s, but not after. Perhaps the term faded away because the sub-genre was never well defined. But people knew it when they saw it, and some writers produced Science Fantasy exclusively. Indeed, the articles suggest that to the degree Science Fantasy was recognized, it was recognized after-the-fact, i.e., by pointing to the works of certain writers, rather than to some set of commonly accepted genre rules. (Much like we're doing here.) The lack of definition for the sub-genre might be attributed to the fact that there wasn't a magazine with a really strong editor shaping Science Fantasy, the way Astounding and John Campbell shaped Hard SF, or Galaxy and Herbert Gold shaped a more literary SF. It might be, too, that SF readers in those days had a measure of aversion to fantasy, or anything approaching fantasy. So the good news might be that Science Fantasy is still wide open for development - more open to development than other categories of SF, with their established masters and golden ages. And the market today (when fantasy outsells SF) might be more open to it.
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My encyclopaedia was printed in 1958, I think, though as the inside cover page is missing I can't be sure.
Your point about CSLewis is interesting - I didn't know he wrote his Mars and Venus books partly in reply to a challenge. He did say that he wrote as he did about Perelandra (Venus) because he wanted to write about floating islands; he insisted that this and not the theological speculation was his prime motivation. In other words, he was having fun. But once embarked on that fun course, his work drew strength from the Mars / Venus archetypes which I have tried to mention in this thread. To have set the novels on some extrasolar planet would definitely not have worked so well. At one point near the end of Perelandra, Ramsom exclaims to himself, "I have seen Ares and Aphrodite" - not the old gods as such but the reality behind them, the Intelligences which inspire and govern those worlds.
Good news indeed. And Science Fantasy the genre rules could be further studied / divined / evolved. It would mean fewer misplaced criticisms, books being unfairly castigated for not being what they actually weren't meant to be. Deliberate anachronisms, poetic licence in a way, would become more acceptable. Lin Carter wrote four quite good books set on a Mars with a breathable atmosphere and native inhabitants - though as a partial concenssion to realism he wrote that people had to undergo some biological modification to survive there. But he was still criticised for being out of date. Let's stick up for anachro-lib.
Ray McCarthy
Sentient Marmite: The Truth may make you fret.
"That Hideous Strength" is the 3rd, and far the best and is entirely on Earth.
Alternative Realities?
Tom Hering
Rememberer
Just two days ago I read a novelette by Algis Budrys, Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night. Mars with ancient cities and living Martians. Published in Galaxy, 1961, when almost nothing was known about the surface of Mars - Mariner 4 wouldn't make its flyby of the Red Planet until 1965. Still, there must have already been strong doubts, in 1961, that Mars was inhabited by any life form higher than fungus. So Budry's story had at least one foot firmly planted in Science Fantasy. This didn't keep it from being recognized as a great story - it was included in The Tenth Galaxy Reader (1967, two years after Mariner 4), Door to Anywhere (1970), Alpha 2 (1971), Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction (1980), The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction (1980), Great Science Fiction of the 20th Century (1987), and The Great SF Stories #23 (1991). I'm sure if we read through the list of Hugo and Nebula winners and nominees, we'd find many more examples of Science Fantasy that were highly thought of - especially among the novellas, novelettes, and short stories.
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Tom Hering
Rememberer
If we tried to define Science Fantasy, Clarke's suggestion might be a good place to start. If a work of Science Fiction shouldn't have more than one unlikely thing in it, then a work of Science Fantasy doesn't need more than one likely thing in it - to anchor it in the science side of things, i.e., to keep it from being pure fantasy. This one likely thing would, of course, be some sort of scientific limitation on the story. And using this measure, if we were to read every Science Fiction story ever written, we'd find that most of them are actually Science Fantasy. Something the proponents of Hard SF have argued all along! But I may be straying too far from Zendexor's original post, which wasn't about Science Fantasy so much as it was about anachronistic Science Fantasy.
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Ray McCarthy
Sentient Marmite: The Truth may make you fret.
We knew a lot by 1909, never mind 1961. Mariner 4 was better pictures.
We are still looking for the water, bacteria, fungus
Spectroscopic analysis tells a lot. Now we are doing it on planets round other suns.
Almost all SF might be anachronistic. The word means out of place in time
not necessarily obsoleted.
Tom Hering
Rememberer
I'm repeating what you'll find at NASA and other sites about the Mariner 4 mission, i.e., that very little was known about the surface of Mars before 1965. Perhaps I should have emphasized "surface." Certainly, by 1961, there was spectroscopic evidence that Mars probably lacked surface water and vegetation. But these were still considered somewhat possible until Mariner 4, when it became clear as a bell that Mars was a dead world. (I'll leave it right there so this thread doesn't go off the rails.)
Tom Hering
Rememberer
Almost all SF might be anachronistic. The word means out of place in time
True, but we're using the word in this discussion in the sense of obsolete concepts, because we're talking about the possibility of reviving obsolete concepts.
Ray McCarthy
Sentient Marmite: The Truth may make you fret.
The word obsolete or outdated is then better
Tom Hering
Rememberer
The word obsolete or outdated is then better
In these times, "outdated" is the kiss of death for anyone and anything.
That Hideous Strength is certainly great - in my opinion perhaps the greatest sf novel in one sense, that of combining flawless writing, characterisation, and the impinging-of-wider-things-on-an-ordinary-community (don't know a short way of saying this).
Alternative realities as a justification for science fantasy: yes, with the proviso that some of the alternatives are a darn sight better and (if I could only hope) more valid and real than this one. I think I'd prefer Dan Dare's solar system to ours, for example, even if we did have to put up with the Mekon...
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