the implicizer aimed at
the moth-men of phobos

We only get given three brief, tantalising CLUFFs about the Phobians in the Leigh Brackett novella The Halfling.

...There were three or four little moth-people from Phobos roosting up on the braces so their delicate wings wouldn't get damaged in the crush...

...I half carried her out, with the moth-people fluttering their gorgeous wings around our heads and praising her in their soft, furry little voices...

...there were half a dozen little moth-people bouncing in the air over my head, squeaking with fear and shining their great eyes at me...

Suppose we aren't satisfied with these meagre CLUFFs about life on Phobos, and are determined to find out more?

Stid: You could accept that you can't squeeze out of the text any more than the author gives.

Zendexor: But the "squeeze" is precisely what our mental gadget can do; in fact, rather than name it the implicizer, I could have called it the squeezer!

When I first coined the term, I was thinking of a mainly statistical procedure; the idea being to infer from the entirety of an author's work what he or she might have written when following up the theme. This certainly would be the way to go about writing a pastiche.

But there's another way to squeeze out a fuller scenario from meagre evidence, if all we want is to deepen our view. In this style of implicizer, we don't have to rely so much on a literary study of the author in question. We can go back to the first principles of the OSS, and extract the latent details from our own heads. Self-interrogation is the order of the day. Start with: what do we want?

Harlei: Phobians that are believable in OSS terms.

Zendexor: An excellent answer, Harlei. A credibility gap needs to be bridged before we can go further with Phobos as a living world. Real scientific credbility is of course out of the question, but we don't need that in OSS literature; what we must have is literary credibility, by which I mean that the essential identity-boundaries must be respected.

Thus, although we can portray Phobos as lush and green and covered with life, it nevertheless has got to be small, very small, and its gravity low. Brackett's light, fluttery moth-men fit in with this requirement, but we must make further excuses for their existence. And our excuses will tell us more of what we wish to know.

In other words, the problem contains within it the seeds or sap or juice of the solution.

Stid: You're not going to find it easy to give Phobos a thick enough atmosphere for the moth-men to flutter around in, given the tiny mass of that moon.

Zendexor: That is the key to it all! The Phobian atmosphere! This is where we squeeze the problem till what oozes out of it is the solution!

Here goes:

Gravity has insufficient force to keep an atmosphere wrapped round Phobos. Yet the moth-men have learned to fly in air, we know, because Leigh Brackett says so. So on their tiny home-world they must have an atmosphere, gravity or no gravity. So the Phobian atmosphere must be retained by a non-gravitational force.

Such a force could owe its power to... the mystery called life. Yes, that's it! The Phobian atmosphere is some sort of living entity, in symbiosis with the body of the satellite itself.

It could be one of the rare last relics of such symbiosis, a primitive life-system dating from the early days of the Solar System when the rocks and the gases of the young solar nebula were still throbbing with their pristine energies...

The air stays around OSS Phobos, therefore, because it "wants" to.

Harlei: And that idea in turn may inspire more plots for stories...