But Is It NOSS?

by John Michael Greer
(Cumberland, MD, USA)

As noted in a comment to Dylan's piece "Still Here!", I've got a hypothetical quasi-NOSS setting in mind for a story set on an inhabited Mars -- to be precise, on the border between BREM and WOM, as there's thin but just-barely-breathable air in the lowlands of Iruwon (the native name for my Mars) but you can't leave the lowlands without breathing gear. It's notionally in our universe. How? There hangs a tale...

When the inhabitants of the third planet, that brilliant blue star in the skies of Iruwon, started launching space probes, the Iru -- the people of the fourth planet -- figured that out right away. The Iru have a history going back some nine million years; they're definitely on the downside of their historical arc, but they've got a lot of archaic technology, some of it much more advanced than ours, and a certain amount of that is in working order. They picked up Terran radio signals not long after Marconi's time, though they couldn't decipher them, and watched warily as the first satellites popped out of the third planet's atmosphere. Close observation led them to realize that the third planet was inhabited by a prolific, energetic, and violent species that might easily see Iruwon as so much available real estate. Sooner or later they might start sending probes toward Iruwon. What to do?

Old, cold, devious minds stayed up late into the Martian night plotting. Pressure waves fluttered through the hair-thin tubes of hydraulic computers. Records dating back to the second of the Eleven Luminous Dynasties at the dawn of Iru history were consulted. A decision was reached by the sayende of the Eighteen Cities -- and the Iru proceeded to hack Earth's space probes.

Ever notice how many probes sent to Mars have crashed, malfunctioned, or just plain never seemed to work right? That's their doing. The ones that did send back data, from the Mariner flybys on, sent back fake data designed to make Mars look much less inhabitable than it is. Probes en route to Mars were jumped by robot spacecraft ranging out from the orbital station we call Deimos -- both the "moons" of Mars, in my fictive universe, are asteroids brought in from the belt by spacecraft in ancient times, Phobos for its minerals and Deimos as an orbital base -- and popped open and gimmicked.

The first few attempts to hack Earthling space probes were a matter of frantic jerry-rigging -- it had never occurred to Iru scientists that anybody might try to use the odd but impractical phenomenon of electricity the way the alien minds of the third planet did. That's why they "crashed" several probes, brought them home to Mars, and put their best minds on the task of cracking the secrets of an almost incomprehensible science. They succeeded -- but the probes just kept on coming.

Finally, of course, a manned spacecraft from the third planet made the trip, and the scientists on board were aghast to discover -- as their magnetometers detected the supposedly nonexistent Martian magnetic field, their spectroscopes picked up much more atmosphere than should have been there, and finally their telescopes spotted the unmistakable traces of roads and cities -- just how thoroughly they'd been bamboozled.

To my mind, it's a fun angle, as it plays with some of the limitations of science as currently practiced, it pokes a little fun at humanity's assumption that nobody can possibly be as clever as we are, and it allows for an inhabited Mars with sword-swinging native critters. But here's my question: is this a NOSS setting, or is it something else? And if so, what?

{Z: You're on to a winner here - what a plot!! As to how to classify it: I would call it OSS for content - as it could have been written decades earlier as far as its basic idea is concerned (there have been quite a few stories about Martians trying to fool us in one way or another) - and "NOSS" only for its date of publication, i.e. NOSS insofar as it could be part of a new literary rebirth of interest in the OSS.

After all, you are not positing any different or alternate dimension here; your plot is that we are being bamboozled in this dimension. That seems to me to be more exciting than the dimensional stuff. More immediate.}