the sunport vista:
zendexor's
oss
diary

december 2016

2016 December 31st:

AT MARTIAN SWORDPOINT - HOW NOT TO DO IT - AND HOW TO DO IT

How not to do it:

...He stared at me in horror for a moment.

That moment was all I needed.  In a flash I had darted forward and snatched his own sword from his belt!

I pressed the point gently against his throat and said with a grim smile on my lips:  "Call for your guards, Chinod Sai - and you call for death!"

He paled and gurgled something.  I gestured for him to come into the room and shut the door.  I had been lucky.  Everyone had been too busy with whatever else they were concerned with to notice what had happened to their 'Bradhi'.

"Speak in a low voice," I ordered.  "Tell me what is happening and where my comrade is."

"How - how did you escape?"

"I am asking the questions, my friend.  Now - answer!"

He grunted.  "What do you mean?"

"Answer!"

"The scum are attacking my palace," he said...

And this is how to do it:

...He looked at me suspiciously.  "You bring a written order?" he asked.

"Of course not," I replied, "it is not necessary.  She is not to be taken out of the palace; merely from one apartment to another."

"I must have a written order," he snapped.

"Haj Osis will not be pleased," I said, "when he learns that you have refused to obey his command."

"I am not refusing," said Yo Seno.  "Do not dare to say that I refuse.  I cannot turn a prisoner over without a written order.  Show me your authority and I will give you the keys."

I saw that the plan had failed; other measures must be taken.  I whipped out my long sword.  "Here is my authority!" I exclaimed, leaping towards him.

With an oath he drew his own sword, but instead of facing me with it he stepped quickly back, the desk still between us, and, turning, struck a copper gong heavily with the flat of his blade...

2016 December 30th:

MORE UNREASONABLE DEMANDS AND ABSURD COMPARISONS

On a moral and mental holiday, I am relaxing into unreasonableness, as readers will doubtless have noticed from yesterday's entry.

...I must have seemed like some apparition melting out of nothingness, so swift and silent had been my approach.  Indeed, the man closest to me turned with a start, eyes goggling, as I sprang from the alley's mouth to drive my steel through his shoulder.  His cutlass rang on the cobbles and his hoarse cry of astonishment and pain drew the attention of his fellows to the fact of my presence.

Surprise is always a strong advantage in any battle, and I managed to slay two of the mob before a sufficient number engaged my blade...

Why the heck - here the rant begins - could not this account of the swordfight on page 136 of Lin Carter's Jandar of Callisto - not a badly written episode - be better than it was; why could it not have been as good in its way as Ransom's fight with the Un-man on pages 139-143 of Perelandra?

That's a demand with quite a high unreasonableness-quotient. 

...the Un-man was upon him, howling like a gale, with eyes so wide opened that they seemed to have no lids, and with all its hair rising on its scalp.  It had caught him tightly to its chest, with its arms about him, and its nails were ripping great strips off his back.  His own arms were inside its embrace and, pummelling wildly, he could get no blow at it.  He turned his head and bit deeply into the muscles of its right arm, at first without success, then deeper.  It gave a howl, tried to hold on, and then suddenly he was free.  Its defence was for an instant unready and he found himself raining punches about the region of its heart, faster and harder than he had supposed possible.  He could hear through its open mouth the great gusts of breath that he was knocking out of it.  Then its hands came up again, fingers arched like claws.  It was not trying to box.  It wanted to grapple.  He knocked its right arm aside with a horrible shock of bone against bone and caught it a jab on the fleshy part of the chin...

Incidentally, C S Lewis' mastery of pace and style of English enables him to get away with very long paragraphs.  And yes, I know the comparison I made is stupid, I know I ought to have compared Jandar's sword fight with another sword fight, not with an all-in wrestling match against a demon.  The whole point of being unreasonable is one is liberated from such logic...

Now, to match that unequal juxtaposition of fight scenes, here's an equally cheeky comparison - of Edgar Rice Burroughs with Homer.

Homer has his resonant stock phrases: "the wine-dark sea"; "rosy-fingered dawn".  So does ERB: "sleeping silks and furs"; "the dead sea bottoms"; "the thin air of dying Mars"; "far Gathol".

Except - is it really unreasonable?  As a comparison, doesn't it actually achieve validity?

Burroughs has many virtues as a writer, as well as many defects, but what makes his work something special is - in my opinion - the secret of his prose-rhythm, the incantatory power of his cadences.  Imagination is vital, but many writers have it.  Many a book is dull not because of a lack of ideas but because they clunk onto the page.  ERB never clunks.

Meanwhile, if possible, I shall try to go back to being reasonable tomorrow.

[And see the previous entry, 29th Dec. below:]

2016 December 29th:  

UNREASONABLE DEMANDS AND ABSURD COMPARISONS

There's a clownish side to me which every so often surfaces in a sudden urge to make ridiculous literary comparisons.  Thus, more than once I've fancied the idea that one day I might write a learned piece of criticism comparing (say) Robert E Howard's Conan novel The Hour of the Dragon with Jane Austen's Mansfield Park; or Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Fighting Man of Mars with George Eliot's Middlemarch.

I might then decide in favour of the Howard and Burroughs novels because of the superior coverage they give to vistas of other cultures and worlds, while Austen and Eliot dismally fail to give us any perspective regarding Barsoom and the Hyborian Age.

Not fair, obviously.  An approach which misses the point, many will say, raising their eyes to the ceiling...  But this is where the clowning might stop and the discussion really get interesting: why is it that some of us go for Barsoom etc and others can't get beyond admiration for Austen and Eliot?  (For the record: I greatly enjoy reading Austen except for Mansfield Park; I liked Middlemarch when reading it but don't want to read it again.)  What makes one person a certain kind of reader and another person different?  "No accounting for tastes", one might say, shrugging, but isn't this a crucial mystery?

For we all like vistas; we all read so as to have our consciousness expanded in some way or other.  Why, then, do some people want it expanded by one means rather than another?

So what started as a comparison between books develops into a comparison between types of reader.

Here's an analogy that has just popped into my head: an OSS fan is like a jeweller, whereas a "mainstream" fan is like a watchmaker.  The jeweller sees fascination in the essence of a jewel's light; the watchmaker sees fascination in the complexities of a system.

I'm trying to get at something - but the analogy isn't really good enough.

2016 December 28th:   

MORE PERELANDRIAN INSIGHTS

Continuing to mine the rich seam of perceptions in C S Lewis' Venusian masterpiece, I revisit a passage on page 186-7 in which Ransom of Earth inquires of the Intelligences that govern Venus and Mars: how come the myths of Earth guessed at the femininity of the one and the masculinity of the other?

The answer, when it comes, chimes in with what I have been trying to say on the Mercury page and elsewhere, about the convergence of mythic and planetary character.

...He called them by their Tellurian names.  With deep wonder he thought to himself, "My eyes have seen Mars and Venus.  I have seen Ares and Aphrodite."  He asked them how they were known to the old poets of Tellus.  When and from whom had the children of Adam learned that Ares was a man of war and that Aphrodite rose from the sea foam?  Earth had been besieged, an enemy-occupied territory, since before history began.  The gods have no commerce there.  How then do we know of them?  It comes, they told him, a long way round and through many stages.  There is an environment of minds as well as of space.  The universe is one - a spider's web wherein each mind lives along every line, a vast whispering gallery where (save for the direct action of Maleldil) though no news travels unchanged yet no secret can be rigorously kept.  In the mind of the fallen Archon under whom our planet groans, the memory of Deep Heaven and the gods with whom he once consorted is still alive.  Nay, in the very matter of our world, the traces of the celestial commonwealth are not quite lost.  Memory passes through the womb and hovers in the air.  The Muse is a real thing.  A faint breath, as Virgil says, reaches even the late generations.  Our myth is based on a solider reality than we dream: but it is also at an almost infinite distance from that base...

2016 December 27th:   

HOLIDAYING ON THE PLANET OF LOVE

Though I have been given some fascinating OSS fiction for Christmas my most relaxing hours have been spent re-reading a work already in my collection - one that has been there most of my life, and which I have read more times than I can remember.

The newly received works have merits and are interesting, but I find myself having to make some concessions as I read them.  Not so with the other book - the familiar yet always enthralling masterpiece, Perelandra.

A sort of poetic coincidence, that Venus won the Interplanetary Knock-Out this month, at the same time as I felt drawn to re-reading the greatest ever tale set on that planet.

As noted above, the reader needs make no concessions, no allowances; his mind can relax in the hands of a master, a literary superman who can and does do things no-one else can do.

He continually opens out avenues of awareness which set the story he is telling in a wider context.  His world - like Tolkien's "Middle Earth" - is much, much wider than the story-line, hugely great though that storyline is.

...The crying of these birds was often audible, and it was the wildest sound that Ransom had ever heard, the loneliest, and the one that had least to do with Man.  No land was in sight, nor had been for many hours.  He was on the high seas, the waste places of Perelandra, as he had not been since his first arrival.  The sea noises continually filled his ear: the sea smell, unmistakable and stirring as that of our Tellurian oceans, but quite different in its warmth and sweetness, entered into his brain.  It also was wild and strange.  It was not hostile: if it had been, its wildness and strangeness would have been the less, for hostility is a relation and an enemy is not a total stranger.  It came into his head that he knew nothing at all about this world.  Some day, no doubt, it would be peopled by the descendants of the King and Queen.  But all its millions of years in the unpeopled past, all its uncounted miles of water in the laughing present... did they exist solely for that?  It was strange that he to whom a wood or a morning sky on earth had sometimes been a kind of meal, should have had to come to another planet in order to realise Nature as a thing in her own right.  The diffused meaning, the inscrutable character, which had been both in Tellus and Perelandra since they split off from the Sun, and which would be, in one sense, displaced by the advent of imperial man, yet, in some other sense, not displaced at all, enfolded him on every side and caught him into itself... 

2016 December 26th:   

WEIRD MERCURIAN LIFE-FORMS

Two snippets from stories set on the Inmost Planet. 

The first is set on the "the coldest spot in the solar system, where midnight crosses the equator on the black back of Mercury":

A much longer, and somewhat earlier, account of Mercurian-adapted life takes us to the opposite hemisphere, Hotside:

2016 December 24th:   

ANOTHER LOT WHO DON'T KNOW HOW LUCKY THEY ARE

Some while back I mentioned the Mars colonists in Lester del Rey's The Years Draw Nigh who felt lonely and gloomy at the fact that an intelligent race of Martians had died out millions of years ago.  Contrast that attitude with how thrilled we'd be nowadays to discover evidence of any life on Mars at all, at any time in its history.

Now here's another lot who "don't know they're born", as the saying goes:

Captain Jensen of the spaceship Southern Cross was bored sick with Mars.  He and his men had been here for ten days.  They had found no important archaeological specimens, no tantalizing hints of ancient cities such as the Polaris expedition had discovered at the South Pole.  Here there was nothing but sand, a few weary shrubs, and a rolling hill or two.  Their biggest find so far had been three pottery shards...

2016 December 23rd: 

A CONTRASTING PAIR OF ASTEROIDAL HERMITS

Continuing in my recent vein of comparing two tales with the same theme - let's look at two lonely people on two different asteroids.

The first example is the crashlanded castaway of Clark Ashton Smith's Master of the Asteroid.  I have already written extensively about this tremendous story on the asteroids page.  It's one of my top favourites, and if any over-"realistic" critic is inclined to carp at those aspects which might be deemed ridiculous by some, I need merely point out that great art often by-passes literal representation in favour of some deeper realism.  The pictorial arts are an obvious instance of this.  Think of "modern primitive" painters. 

Edmond Beverly, the crashlander, is stuck in his cabin, cannot get out and is doomed to pass the rest of his days, until his air runs out, in the contemplation of the planetoid's landscape through the crystal port of his wrecked ship.  A bleak tale, one would think, and yet the mood goes beyond bleakness to a kind of beyondness - it is indescribable.  The thin insectlike forms of life on the planetoid add to the phantasmal effect.

And now for the other example - in a story by Robert Sheckley, entitled Alone At Last (Infinity, February 1957).

This time, the protagonist wants to be left alone on an asteroid.  He longs for solitude.  He has great difficulty in convincing the authorities to let him go where he years to go.

2016 December 22nd: 

UNEXPECTED SURVIVAL AT PLANETFALL

It has occurred to me for the first time to compare planetfall in two very different books by two very different authors.  The passages I am thinking of have one aspect in common:

They are both superbly exciting accounts of unexpected survival.

Carson Napier in Pirates of Venus does not expect to survive his encounter with the inner planet.  He was doomed anyway, his ship falling towards the Sun, having been deflected by our Moon's gravity after an attempt to head for Mars.  When it became apparent that Venus had got in his way, he simply thought he would be facing death sooner.

...Even though I do not shrink from death, even though the world's best astronomers have assured us that Venus must be unfitted to support human life, that where her surface is not unutterably hot it is unutterably cold, even though she be oxygenless, as they aver, yet the urge to live that is born with each of us compelled me to make the same preparations to land that I should have had I successfully reached my original goal, Mars.

2016 December 21st: 

DARK-BRIGHT THOUGHTS ON THE ASTEROIDS

I've re-read the fine tale Prodigal's Aura (Astounding, April 1951) by Raymond Z Gallun.  It's in the sub-sub-genre of OSS tales which tell of the return of a spacer to Earth, and the effect his return has on his relatives and friends and neighbourhood.

His wide-eyed nephew is all agog to hear of his exploits, whereas his staid brother-in-law bitterly opposes his unsettling effect upon the younger generation.

Jorgensen cursed the wild romanticism.

Certainly Bob's mind was among the asteroids... those fragments of a planet that had been blown up by splitting atoms at its center...  Bobby's spine would be tingling gloriously.  He knew all about it from scientific picture books.  Whole chunks of landscape, miles in extent, had gone skyward with white-hot fire and the dissipating atmosphere.  And the relics of the old civilization that had fought Mars were still on some of those chunks, preserved in the vacuum of space...

2016 December 20th: 

INCANDESCENT JOVIANS

It's a bit of a struggle to justify discussion of The Incandescent Ones, by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle (1977), on this site - since the Jupiter it portrays (in the climax, the novel's last few pages) is the Jupiter known to science; and the beings who hang around it are not the sort to be confined to the OSS sub-genre; they are "wholly different" creatures, and so they'd be as much at home in the New as in the Old Solar System.  So maybe I'm breaking my own rules by talking about this book.

However, I'm going to do it.  After all, if any critic casts aspersions on my space-operatic credentials, I can always refute him by calling for my guards and having him blasted.

I like The Incandescent Ones, like it enough to have read it twice, though I'm not sure I understand all of it.  Hoyle (Fred, with or without his son Geoffrey) is a fun read, yet his outlook, in this and other novels, is melancholy and bleak if it is taken seriously.  In that respect he reminds me of John Wyndham.  But he is less urbane, more blunt, than Wyndham.

It appears that his philosophy is that "scientism" which holds that values are emergent rather than transcendent, as though one could derive value from fact.  Yet like many such thinkers he seems drawn to something more profound.

I like the bit when we see the reaction of a being who discovers for the first time that he is not a man but a robot.  He argues quite spiritedly with the human, a Mr Edelstam, who has broken the news to him.

"I'd like to know in what way the two of us are really different.  You speak... of me being programmed to do certain things.  O.K.  Suppose I accept that.  But what of you?  Aren't you just a robot in your own way, programmed just as certainly to do your own thing?"

Edelstam thought about this for what seemed a very long time...

"I'm not going to take my stand on a question of the soul," he said, "although there are a lot of people of my faith who would do just that.  Maybe I am programmed.  But I am programmed through the relation of mankind to the whole world."

"And I'm programmed by the incandescent ones?"

"Right."

"But maybe it's better to be programmed by a creature who knows exactly what it's doing than by a blind relationship to the whole world.  Mr Edelstam, on reflection I'm prepared to assert that you, as a human, are nothing but a random creature, a freak of fate, whereas I and my kind are of a purposive construction, well designed by a great and subtle intellect..."

2016 December 19th:

INNOCENCE AND THE PLANET OF LOVE

The true sf sense of wonder from open-ended adventure doesn't only involve new spatial horizons.  A new category, or the mystery of a known category, counts as adventurous too.  Thus a good tale about artificial intelligence, for instance, can give us that special sf frisson, just as much as the first voyage to some other world.

In fact the two types of wonder overlap in the characters of worlds of the Old Solar System.  Each OSS world is as individual and unique as a primary colour.  It's a category of being, as well as an arena for struggles, pioneers and quests.

With C S Lewis it all comes together.  His Cosmic Trilogy explores both categories of being and characters of worlds.

For example, he can make one reflect on what "innocence" really is, at its unattainable core:

2016 December 18th: 

LIVING AS LONG AS JOHN CARTER

My stream of consciousness today takes me from the mention of "that deathless Virginian, John Carter" in The Moon Maid, where it's stated that he's still around in the twenty-first century, to another, further thought -

That in an effective sense - that of witnessing historic change - many other Americans have a longevity approaching his.

This is because American history is so amazingly compressed.  Consider the following true mind-boggler:

The outbreak of the Civil War, and America's entry into the Second World War, are only 80 years apart.  In other words:

The same person might easily have witnessed, as an adult, both the attack on Fort Sumter and the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The equivalent for a Briton would only be possible if one could live for three centuries: to witness both Charles the First's raising of his standard at Nottingham in August 1642 and the 1939 declaration of war on Hitler's Germany. 

And if you stretch things a bit so that the person doesn't have to be an adult on both occasions, you could have (say) a child patted on the head by General Custer on the way to the Little Big Horn in 1876, later watching TV images of the Moon landing in 1969 and perhaps Nixon's resignation in 1974. 

Of course, human culture is now to a great extent global, and we all share in the speed of change.  But actually globalization has coincided with a slow-down in technological progress.  The 48 years that have now elapsed since the Christmas flight of Apollo 8 can't rival the preceding 48 years, 1920-1968, in that respect.  (Unless you think that playing with computers is the aim of life!)

2016 December 17th:

A BOOK THAT VEERS AWAY

It's woefully tantalising, the way R W Mackleworth's Starflight 3000 (1972) breaks off from its opening theme.

It's the fascinating theme of a future Moon which has begun to acquire air and water. 

2016 December 16th: 

HAMILTON GOES ON A DETOUR

Edmond Hamilton is one of the greatest-ever OSS authors because of his instinctive fidelity to the archetypal characters of worlds of the Old Solar System.  But on two occasions that I know of, he... shall we say... deviated from the script.

One is the grimly realistic tale What's It Like Out There? in which he envisages a space program founded upon optimistic lies.  Very well written, but not our cup of tea.

The other occasion is his humorous tale, Wacky World (Amazing Stories, March 1942).  The plot is reminiscent of Bradbury's The Exiles, as it postulates a Mars peopled with characters who depend for their reality upon the ideas of terrestrial writers.  But where Bradbury uses the theme darkly, to make a point about the vulnerability of our literary traditions, Hamilton uses it merely for a merry spoof on certain depictions of the standard model Mars (including his own).

2016 December 15th: 

MARTIANS - CHEERFUL OR FATALISTIC?

My appreciation of the cheerful Martians of Barsoom is heightened when I compare that scene with other literary depictions of Martians.  The only major cheerful Mars that I can think of right now, apart from Burroughs', is C S Lewis' Malacandra, whose inhabitants are likewise imbued with a positive outlook.

Contrast the sombre mood of Leigh Brackett's unforgettable, romantic, mysterious Mars.  To be sure, the night life in Jekkara is sprightly enough (see the magnificent opening paragraphs of The Sword of Rhiannon), but with more than a whiff of corruption, and in general the planet is suffused with a sense of decay. 

The Martians in No Man Friday and in Red Planet don't seem to feel threatened; they have reached such equilibrium with their environment, that one feels they have millions of years ahead of them.  So you don't get a sense of decay; but neither is there room for the brave contrast between defiant gaiety and impending doom that you get with the Barsoomians.

And just now I was glancing through John Wyndham's Sleepers of Mars - the novella-sequel to his novel Stowaway to Mars.  This is an example of the Martian situation affecting the mood of explorers from Earth.

...the many millions of a few thousand years ago were now reduced to a mere handful, working out their existences in seven cities far too big for their needs, in the face of the knowledge that a few more generations must see the end...  And the comparison between the end of Mars and the end of Earth was inescapable.  It was in that that the real pang of depression lay for the Tovaritch's crew.  After the first few days they had found themselves unconsciously asking:  What's the use?

Indeed, what was the use?  Why civilise?  Why build?  Why try to live by a code?  Why try to cross space?  Why do anything if this was to be the end of it all?...

2016 December 14th:

BEETLES OR WINGED FOLK - WHO RULES MARS?

...The terrace overhung a thicket of the most luxuriant and graceful vegetation, and beyond this was a wide grassy lawn on which certain broad creatures, in form like beetles but enormously larger, reposed...

2016 December 13th:  The title of this Diary, "The Sunport Vista", sounds - come to think of it - like a good title for a Solar System daily newspaper.  Main offices on Ceres, perhaps, centrally placed between the inner and the outer System, but there'd be a special Earth edition printed locally on the third planet...  And as for headlines, the subject matter of the Diary could furnish ideas - for instance today, let's start with:

VENUSIAN SQUID CAPTURED ON FILM

A seascape broke the shadows of a cloudy but brilliantly bright horizon.  The sea was flat, a tideless expanse of water.  Suddenly, in those murky depths, there was stirring.  A creature charged into view.  It burst the surface and leaped up, twenty, fifty, a hundred feet.  Its enormous, bulbous head and vast, yawning mouth seemed almost to touch the camera.  And then it began to fall, still struggling, still furiously determined to grasp the prey at which it had leaped.

It failed.  It fell.  It hit the water with a splash so gigantic that Dorman was startled.  He had been admiring the illusion of stark reality that had been produced with what must be an artificial monster-being activated in some indoor imitation sea.  But those splashes looked real...

2016 December 12th:  Negotiations with neo-OSS author Robert Gibson have taken a good turn from my point of view, with finalization of what you might call the Zendexor-Gibson Facebook Treaty of December 2016. 

I wasn't getting anywhere much with his recent kind offer of letting me use a facebook page under his guidance (and his wife's); and I couldn't very well hope to set up my own account without sooner or later revealing my extra-terrestrial identity for all Earthlings to see.

Besides, social media just aren't my scene.  On the other hand, I do acknowledge their importance.

So - I have persuaded RG simply to take over the management of the Solar System Heritage Facebook page himself.  After all, he set it up; he can use it as he sees fit. 

On a different topic: I thought it might be a good idea to do day-by-day cumulative scores in the Interplanetary Knock Out, from the quarter-final stage onward.  Statistically it adds to the interest.

2016 December 11th:  It can be very interesting to ponder how what seems like a sad disappointment to one era might seem wildly fortunate in another.  I think of this in connection with Lester del Rey's The Years Draw Nigh (Astounding, October 1951) - a powerful mood piece set on a dusty, tired old Mars, in an age when men had gone out to the stars and found no life anywhere.

It had proven to be a barren universe, except for Earth and the Mars of perhaps ten million years ago.  Zeke looked at the ruins again, still faintly visible in the light that sliced out from his window.  Whatever had built them had reached a civilization at least as high as man's.  What had happened to them that had made a culture capable of such work come to a sudden and unexpected end?

2016 December 10th:  "Minerva" is a great name for an extra planet for the Solar System.  I can think of two novels in which it has been used for such.  Both date from the 1970s.

One is James P Hogan's Inherit the Stars, in which Minerva is the name given to the vanished asteroid progenitor planet.

In the other tale, Minerva is The Tenth Planet in the Edmund Cooper novel of that name.

On this site I have often tried to pin down and record the process whereby different works score pathways in the collective consciousness of the OSS, creating traditions which attract further followings, so that a literary gestalt begins to form... but in the case of Minerva, from what I have mentioned so far, the two novels are at odds: Minerva can't be both the 5th and the 10th planet; it has to be one or the other.

I'd plump for the Hogan version.  Cooper is by far the better writer, but Inherit the Stars gives us a better version of Minerva.  The Tenth Planet is icy and dead, as far as native life is concerned, though it is the vital refuge for humanity after the populations on Earth and Mars have destroyed themselves by war; whereas Hogan's asteroid progenitor planet is superbly envisioned.  Inherit the Stars transcends the author's usual clunky prose - maybe it still clunks but the clunkiness doesn't matter so much in that book, or maybe it actually is better written; I can't decide, but I do know that I have read it more than once.  As an epic of scientific discovery and mystery it is fascinating. 

I believe Hogan later wrote a novel entitled Mission to Minerva, in which people go back in time to try to rescue that world from its self-destruction.  Has anyone read it?  If so, could we have your reactions?  For me, Hogan is a writer with great ideas but (except for Inherit the Stars) poor performance; I am thinking of his alternate-World War Two novel The Proteus Experiment, which I couldn't bring myself to finish, it made the most riveting notions seem dull.

[Note added 29th September 2017:

I have found a third use of the name "Minerva": as a name for the newly-discovered ninth planet, before the choice of "Pluto" became current.  The reference is made in Henrik Dahl Juve's The Monsters of Neptune (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Summer 1930):

...They were now on the edge of explored space.  Only the new ninth planet, Minerva, about which little was known, lay beyond.  Dana had thought of visiting the outer planet, but somehow Neptune seemed more attractive...

2016 December 9th:  Novels about alien invasion from elsewhere in the Solar System are bound to count as OSS tales, because - well, who is there to invade us, in our New Solar System?  Nobody.  So it has to be OSS.  And yet, one tale I am thinking of, published in 1953, has a very modern feel, as far as the nature of the threat is concerned.

I wonder if the type of aliens depicted might actually be NSS as well as OSS, after all.

The threat comes from Earth's ocean deeps, but there are strong hints that the creatures did not evolve there - that they arrived by spaceship from some high-pressure environment, such as the deeps of Jupiter.

Making themselves at home in our deeps, they begin to alter the terrestrial environment, excavating new  channels to connect separate areas of great depth, and melting the ice caps to increase the volume of ocean.

I refer, of course, to John Wyndham's magnificent disaster novel The Kraken Wakes.  Now it would be interesting, to say the least, to have a sequel to that story, set maybe a century later, when a revived humanity achieves spaceflight as far as Jupiter, and begins to investigate, and perhaps to interfere, in turn...

This train of thought is part of a game one can play, of dreaming up sequels to novels.  Perhaps readers might contribute their own favourite ideas in this field.  Of course, with some tales, you'd have to posit an alternate reality - for instance, you could only have a sequel to Wells' The First Men in the Moon, if the Moon is viewed as very different from what we know it to be.  But that's all right - permission is granted!

2016 December 8th:  Here, from a not very good novel set on Mars, is what I think is an interesting fragment:

2016 December 7th:  Exactly 75 years to the day since the attack on Pearl Harbor.  World-shaking history continues to happen, but perhaps the 55 years 1914-69 were the peak of change - the summit of the dy/dx curve.

Now, as I sit here living in the future, I wonder which year is "The Present" for you?  Any thoughts?

From an article by John Varley published in 1979:

I never really stopped living in 1955.  This means that for almost 25 years I have been seeing into the future.  It's not a bad perspective to have, if one plans to be a science-fiction writer.

From my vantage point in 1955, I can look ahead and see things with the utmost clarity until late in the year 1979.  Beyond that my crystal ball clouds, but every day I see a little further.  There's a good chance that one day I'll be able to see as far as the year 1990.  The turn of the century might even be attainable.

From where I sit here in the mid-fifties, the future is going to be much a stranger than anyone around right now suspects...

2016 December 5th:  For some reason, I was thinking again as I had done, back in August, about the modern movement known as "slow food", a rebellion against the idea of "fast food" - that's to say, a wish to take more trouble over the business of meals, and appreciate them more carefully.  Quick as a flash my analogy-prone mind returned to the notion of "slow space-travel", a revolt against the facile zooming around which tends to devalue the seriousness of journeys through the great void.

Of course, sometimes you have to zoom, for instance if you're Captain Future - there isn't time to have lengthy voyages between world and world, if you have to save the System in double quick time from the evil machinations of so-and-so.

Still, it's good when we find a nice slow serious voyage.

The voyages to Mars in those two very different books, Out of the Silent Planet and The Sands of Mars, take a decent length of time, very productive as regards plot and characterisation.  Then there's the even longer voyages from Mars to Earth attempted in The Moon Maid:

In 2015 Mars had dispatched a ship for Earth with a crew of five men provisioned for ten years.  It was hoped that with good luck the trip might be made in something less than five years, as the craft had developed an actual trip speed of one thousand miles per hour.  At the time of my graduation the ship was already off its course almost a million miles and was generally conceded to be hopelessly lost.  Its crew, maintaining constant radio communication with both Earth and Mars, still hoped for success, but the best informed upon both worlds had given them up...

2016 December 4th:  Missed out on the Diary yesterday because I was so busy on the Zones Cup - among other things; and I still haven't finished it, but I want to take a breather from that and mention a Martian adventure which is, I strongly believe, well worth recommending.

Actually the first half of it is an Earth adventure - a desperate one.  It's a matter of choosing who on Earth is going to survive an imminent increase in the Sun's output of heat.  Not just a flare, but a permanent stepping-up of solar radiation, it will roast and parch the Earth, and there are only a few months to choose who can be taken to the one available refuge, the colony on Mars.

The book is J T McIntosh's One In Three Hundred (1956).

It's very much a character-driven book, the main interest being in the personalities involved in the story.  Mars itself is described adequately for the book's purpose, but I can't even remember whether or not there is any native life.  Probably there's some native vegetation, for the atmosphere is marginally breathable, making this a borderline WOM/BREM (see the Mars page on this site).

The Sun's brightening causes big changes on Mars as well as on Earth, of course, but whereas the effect is to kill Earth, it helps make Mars more habitable for those people who manage to get there.

2016 December 2nd:  Here's a good old-style spacesuit looking like a suit of armour: