guidelines to
Guess the world

Email your mystery-snippets of OSS literature or OSS-related illustrations to me at heritageofdreams@aol.com.

Along with each passage, provide me with the answer, i.e. which world the scene is set on, plus the name of the author and the tale, and the issue of the magazine in which it appeared or, in the case of a novel, the date it was published, or, in the case of a picture, a reference to its source.

Make it easy or hard - I don't mind! Just don't send excerpts that are too obvious, such as in, "I was ambling along the canal bank under the light of the two moons..." or "We camped beside the Great Red Spot and toasted our supper on the fringe of the lava..."

However, don't worry about name-references; I can easily elide any tell-tale names in the text, thus: [..........]. This is often necessary.

One final consideration, which has come to the fore as we embark on the fifth GTW series, concerns the choice of sources.

Up to this point I have striven to ensure that the story/world match in any one extract has not already been used for another GTW entry. That's to say, although many tales are multi-world (think of the Captain Future novel Magic Moon from which I've obtained GTW entries for Jupiter, Neptune and Styx), I've tried to make sure that no single world has had more than one GTW extract from the same tale.

So for example, as write this (on 14 May 2024), if you look through the 56 scenes on the What to see on Mars page you should find that each and every one is from a different story. If there has been duplication of source, it will have been due to an oversight. As a matter of fact I believe that there has been at least one such GTW oversight (though not for Mars) but in general the uniqueness rule has held true for the whole gamut of 400 entries ranging over the Solar System - so far.

I expect, however, that eventually I'll have to relax this rule, as it becomes harder to mine the literary trove, which is vast but not infinite, without some source/world duplication.

Besides, if you consider the way a story may provide us with greatly differing scenes on the same world (think of the contrast between the floating islands and the fixed lands on Perelandra), you may agree that in such a case it would be quite acceptable for the quiz to derive more than one GTW entry from the same tale.

Still, if you're thinking of sending an entry in to me and you wish to ensure its source-uniqueness, you can easily check: just have a look at the relevant "what to see on..." page to ascertain whether the tale has already been cited.

I hope you have as much fun as I have had in choosing material. The field is open wide!