the sunport vista:
zendexor's
oss
diary

march 2017

2017 March 30th:  

LONG LIVE TELEMORPHS

In my dogged campaign against COMOLD in the worlds of the OSS, I cheer up whenever I am able to seize upon evidence of convergent evolution. 

Czuv the Callistan, on pp.129-130 of Doc Smith's Spacehounds of IPC, gives the following invaluable testimony:

"...In the evolution of the various forms of life upon Callisto, two genera developed intelligence far ahead of all the others.  One genus was the human, as you or I; the other the hexan.  This creature, happily unknown to you of the planets nearer our common sun, is the product of an entirely different evolution...

"Ages ago, then, the human and the hexan developed upon all four of the major satellites of the Great Planet, which you know as Jupiter, and upon the north polar region of Jupiter itself.  By what means the two races came into being upon worlds so widely separated in space we know not - we only know it to be a fact..."

2017 March 29th:  

ASSESSING VAN VOGT AS A WRITER

In yesterday's Diary I was discussing two writers whom I (and doubtless most critics) regard as stylists.  Clark Ashton Smith and Arthur C Clarke are surely writers whose power partly depends on their mastery of English.  Other examples are Clifford Simak and Eric Frank Russell, who likewise put their own individual stamp on their use of the language.  I would also class Edgar Rice Burroughs as an excellent stylist on his good days, though I dare say most critics would disagree.

Then there are "bad" writers, "bad" in the sense that they use language clumsily or without any sense of euphony.  I would put Jack Williamson in this category.  He wrote some great stories, but they're great despite his deficiencies as a writer.  In sf, perhaps more than in other genres, you can make up in a blaze of imaginative power what you lack in literary skill.  You can, in other words, write in the grip of an inspiration that wins over your readers, so that they hardly notice the clunk clunk of your prose.

And then we have A E van Vogt.

At his best he certainly counts as an inspired - madly inspired - story-teller.  In his golden period his visions were unexcelled.  Unfortunately for our sub-genre, not many of his tales were set in the Old Solar System, but out of those that were, you can't beat Repetition and Vault of the Beast.

He's great.  But - stylistically - is he good?

I find this an extraordinarily difficult question to answer.

He is a master of the potent surprise, the slash of colour across one's attention, the sudden dose of sinister dramatic irony.  Vault of the Beast is the quintessential example.  I don't want to give extracts out of context, but here's one anyway.  The man called Hughes is speaking to what he thinks is a human being.

Hughes interrupted: "Those are exactly the points which I am stressing.  I knew you would see what I meant, Louis."

"Of course, I see," said the creature, smiling in grim amusement, for it was feeling very superior these days.  "Your thoughts, your ideas, your code and your methods are stamped irrevocably on your brain and" - it added hastily - "you have never left me in doubt as to where you stand..."

2017 March 28th:  

TECHNOLOGY AND THE COLOURFUL: CAS AND ACC

From somewhere or other I have gleaned the impression that Clark Ashton Smith had a stated aversion to machines, at least to some extent - and indeed much of his work is set in decidedly un-mechanised societies.  You only have to think of Zothique, Hyperborea, Averoigne, etc, to get the point.  Technology in the sense of craftsmanship there is aplenty, but not much in the way of boring mass-produced metal stuff.

That would suggest that his scenarios are limited to the pre-industrial - and yet he has written some superb Old Solar System space-age tales.  The Martian culture depicted in Vulthoom is obviously far advanced.  The Oumnis in The Immortals of Mercury, likewise.  The Terran explorers in The Immeasurable Horror take sophisticated equipment to Venus (not that it enables them to depart unscathed).  In these stories, the technology is present and powerful yet happily does not "grey" the plots.

Examples of this type of CAS story are few, precious, and significant.  They demonstrate a "third way", beyond the either-or duality of "tech or no".  They are neither primitive sword-and-planet stuff, nor whizz-bang "super-science".  They allow technological themes to curl (metaphorically speaking) into gold-leafed ornaments of colourful splendour.

There is perhaps a whiff of this in Arthur C Clarke's far-future novel, The City and The Stars.  Indeed, one would hope that the eventual fate of technology is, precisely, to "curl back" towards craftsmanship, eventually going beyond the stage of mass-production to return, ultimately, to more bespoke creations - aided perhaps by artificial intelligence.  On the other hand his Solar System near-future adventures, Earthlight, The Sands of Mars and A Fall of Moondust, take another route.  They do have the "grey" of technology.  Nevertheless, such is Clarke's genius for suffusing scientific and technological matters in poetic imagery, that he can charm the reader into regarding the technical stuff as somehow humanized. 

I suspect that the nuances which I have credited to CAS and ACC require a high degree of literary skill.  Mere imagination, in such cases, isn't enough - in order to pull off the trick they have to weave an incantatory web of expertly crafted language.

2017 March 27th:  

THE BIG HITTERS

We've now had seven of the monthly competitions in the Interplanetary Knock-Out series.  Enough, maybe, to take stock and see if anything serious can be learned from all this sheer fun.

First, the champions (number of trophies in square brackets):

Mercury [1], Venus [2], Mars [1], Jupiter [1] and Saturn [2].

A good distribution across the System.  In chronological order the victories line up as follows:

Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Venus, Venus, Mars, Saturn. 

Too soon to tell for sure, but we might conjecture that the four-month "Inner System Reign" is likely to endure as a memorable feature of the competition's history.

Tides of public interest ebb and flow; thus one zone after another dominates, as we the readers reap the advantage of the variety of OSS scenes - the characters of worlds complementing each other with their amazing richness and uniqueness.

Because it's a five-round competition, the champions are those "teams" (pages) who managed to "win five matches" (get more hits than another page five times) in a row.  But now let's see what the picture looks like when we broaden the investigation. 

Let's consider all the finalists - those who won four-or-more matches in a row.

Mercury [4], Venus [3], Pellucidar [1], Mars [1], The Asteroids [2], Jupiter [1], Saturn [2].

Teams that aren't major planets now appear on the list.  Interestingly, the Asteroids and Saturn both reached two finals (the difference being, the Asteroids lost both and Saturn won both).

Now let's go one level lower and consider all the semi-finalists - those who won three-or-more matches in a row.

Mercury [6], Venus [4], Pellucidar [2], Mars [2], Asteroids [2], Pallas [1], Jupiter [6], Saturn [5].

From this semi-final perspective it seems the two strongest teams are Mercury and Jupiter; whereas from the finals-perspective the two strongest are Mercury and Venus; and from the champion-perspective, Venus and Saturn.

Knock-outs are a chancy business, but they do have the capacity to highlight sudden surges, and this "surge" phenomenon is one I've notices on the site's statistics quite a few times.  Two notable examples in the past year - though they didn't chance to affect the competition results - have been a Pluto surge and a Triton surge, both dramatic and temporary.

2017 March 26th:  

AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE PROGENITOR PLANET

It's a romantic idea - and classic OSS trope - that there was an asteroid progenitor planet, the destruction of which produced the belt of minor planets between Mars and Jupiter.

Isaac Asimov, however, wasn't one for backing tradition over up-to-date science, and in Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids (1953) he plumps for the truth:

...Once it had been thought that there had been a planet between Mars and Jupiter and that geologic ages earlier it had exploded into fragments, but that wasn't so.  It was Jupiter that was the villain.  Its giant gravitational influence had disrupted space for hundreds of millions of miles about it in the eons when the Solar System was being formed.  The cosmic gravel between itself and Mars could never coalesce into a single planet with Jupiter pulling and pulling.  Instead it coalesced into myriads of little worlds...

2017 March 25th:  

THERE'S TIME FOR EVERYTHING

Here's a riddle for you: what connects this wonderful 1934 map of Mercury by Antoniadi with the mind-stretching book The Five Ages of the Universe (1999), by Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin?

Before answering the riddle let me say a few words about each item.

Eugène (I give the familiar French version of his name) Antoniadi was a Greek astronomer invited to France by none other than Camille Flammarion.  He worked at Meudon Observatory.  His book on, and map of, Mercury constitute a sort of classic summing-up of the old belief that the planet had synchronous rotation.  It was strictly scientific, for the time, but turned out to be all wrong (alas). 

The 1999 book by Adams and Laughlin is likewise non-fiction.  It is an epic summary of speculations about the history of our universe from its far past to its much further future.  The "five ages" it describes are:

1. The Primordial Era.  2. The Stelliferous Era.  (That's the one we're living in now.)  3. The Degenerate Era.  (That will be dominated by the "degenerate matter" now to be found only in white dwarf stars.)  4. The Black Hole Era.  5. The Dark Era.

The eras are dated in "cosmological decades", which are on a logarithmic scale, increasing in length by orders of magnitude.  So for example our Stelliferous Era lasts from "decade" 6 to 14, i.e. from the time when the universe is about 1,000,000 years old to when it is about 100,000,000,000,000 years old.  And the Degenerate Era will take us forward to decade 39, which is therefore a number of years with 39 zeroes following the 1. 

For planetary life I don't think we need worry about the Black Hole Era (to decade 100) and still less the Dark Era which is to follow.  The book out-Lovecrafts Lovecraft in its ultimate cosmic gloom - but I love it.  After all, we can hope that new universes will bud themselves into existence by quantum fluctuation at any time...  meanwhile let's focus on the first 30 or so "decades" of our universe; that is, the time that's left to us before proton decay sets in - about a million million million million million (ten-to-the-thirty) years, give or take a few zeroes.

(Let's also assume that the scenario which the authors describe is not substantially altered by the discovery of "dark energy", which is not mentioned at all in their book, and which occurred at about the time of its publication.  I'm just cutting down on the complications.)

So we have all this time in front of us.  What will happen?

Just about anything, I'd say.

Including Reality Options.  Dream Holidays.  Visits to... 

Antoniadi's Mercury - among other versions.

Mind you, it's only rock - but those wonderful names beguile me.  Solitudo Criophori...

2017 March 24th:  

COMBAT IN THE ARENA

Gladiatorial combat is such a cultural feature of life on Barsoom, that I am neither surprised nor disappointed to find the theme duplicated on Lin Carter's Thanator.  At first glance, the theme of lethal arena-games seems to have inserted itself thoroughly into the very idea of a sword-and-planet series.  It has become part of what one can take for granted.

On the other hand, a few interesting and slightly surprising points have just occurred to me.

First, on Barsoom itself, I don't recall the arena-theme occurring at all within the precincts of the planet's top centre of civilization, the Twin Cities of Helium.  It's as though Burroughs wants to leave the option open, that without making a fuss about it he wants to enable us to believe that the Heliumites are rather a cut above that sort of thing. 

Most likely, I reckon, he did not work it out, but we - in making such observations - can (as it were) map his psyche on the issue; we can guess he didn't want the image "Helium" combined with the image "gladiatorial combat". 

Thus we can draw one more little pencil mark on our increasingly detailed map of the moral contours of Barsoom.

It's a subtle map.  The Barsoom tales depend upon a kind of moral live-and-let-live, within certain limits.  We can explore those limits by studying the themes of slavery, war and violence, and how the moral questions they raise are all subordinated to the requirements of story. 

For instance, regarding assassination, we can cite the attitude of John Carter, the Earthman, towards assassination, a theme well set out in the first chapter of Swords of Mars.  He deplores the practice, but does not look down his nose at his Martian friends who accept it.  The topic of assassination and its place in Barsoomian ethics is also brought out in the ambiguous character of Gor Hajus in The Master Mind of Mars.  The short-range simplicities of ERB's scenes are paralleled by a long-range subtlety in the ways they fit together.  But again, I guess he did it by instinct, not by working it out consciously.  Assassination and the arena-theme, therefore, in their variations of application or non-application, are examples of how the various aspects of Barsoom fit together loosely, like the loose molecular bonds of water, causing a liquidity of freedom in the series as a whole.

This brings me finally to another observation about the variety amongst ERB's tales - namely, between one world-series and another. For my second main point is that the arena-theme does not, so far as I can recall, occur at all on his other main world-series, Amtor.

Why this difference hadn't struck me before, I don't know.  But it seems to be a fact - ERB's Venusians, though quite used to fighting with swords, haven't opted to do so for the amusement of crowds, Roman-style.

If he had had similar instances of The Games on both planets, it would have detracted from each.  Fortunately, he wrote by instinct, and his instinct played true.  His Mars and his Venus aren't cut from the same cloth.

2017 March 23rd:  

PERHAPS NO LOSS

Many readers must have asked themselves the question, "What on Earth happened to H G Wells, after he finished The First Men in the Moon?"  That masterpiece, that culmination of his art, came out in 1901, the year he turned 35.  After that, what?  Enjoyable mainstream novels, yes, such as The History of Mr Polly and Tono-Bungay.  Interesting speculations in The Shape of Things to Come.  Loads of rather dated political novels and tracts which one can doubtless mine for nuggets of wisdom.  But the freshness and verve of his science-fictional story-telling genius seems to have deserted him.  Compare the unputdownable First Men in the Moon with The Food of the Gods which came out just three years later.  I find the latter virtually unreadable.

Now, the usual way to consider this is negatively, for example "What a shame; if only he had stuck to his brilliant vein of sf, what wonderful books we might have had from him in the following four-and-a-half decades of his life". 

However, I've just thought of another way of considering the phenomenon of Wellsian decline.

Put it this way.  Let's say Wells the sf writer might as well have died after 1901 - in a way, did die.  What could this tell us about other authors who really, literally, did die young?

Stanley Weinbaum, for instance.  Here we have an obvious example of a tragic loss - an innovative genius who succumbed to cancer in his early 30s, after producing wonderful stories for just a couple of years.

Also consider, in the related genres of fantasy and historical fiction, the case of Robert E Howard.  He killed himself aged 30, a fact which must break the hearts of legions of fans of his Conan stories.

Sad losses - but is it not possible that the losses, while personal tragedies, were not actual losses to the particular genres which mourn them?  Supposing, if they had lived, they had "done a Wells"?  For it's possible they might have done - might, that's to say, have backslid from the type of writing for which they are now remembered, and switched to other genres.  Weinbaum might well have gone mainstream; he was, I believe, planning a mainstream novel.  Howard - so I gather from browsing in a biography of the man - was perhaps at the end of his inventiveness as regards the Conan stories. 

It's worth remembering that Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) produced most of his tales in the relatively short period 1928-36, when he needed to sell stories to support his parents.  He did write some good stuff later on - for example The Metamorphosis of Earth (1951) - but substantially his fame depends on what he had already achieved a quarter century before his death.

Most writers change, and it is not safe to assume that if they had been granted some extra decades they'd have given us more of what we want from them.  A writer as evenly consistent over several decades as was Edgar Rice Burroughs is, perhaps, a rarity.  So if we were to visit an alternate time-track in which H G Wells was run over by a bus in 1902, we could tell his grieving fans, yes, it's sad, but don't bother regretting all the further sf masterpieces which he would have written - because, actually, he wouldn't.

2017 March 22nd:  

PLANET D'ARTAGNAN

One things leads to another, and as I've been reflecting upon French history (see yesterday's Diary) I got to pondering the special aura of Dumas' novels set in the 17th century.  I haven't read them all, but I have avidly read The Three Musqueteers, Twenty Years After, The Man in the Iron Mask and The Black Tulip.  And I can see some parallelism between their milieu and that of Barsoom.  I'm not just making an obvious point about the swashbuckling and the swordplay.

It's more a case of investigating the psychology of the reader - in this case, the one I know about, namely myself, and presumably, by extension, others too.

Burroughs and Dumas didn't just master a milieu (in Burroughs' case, a wholly imaginary one).  They also achieved a  high degree of what I might call moral creativity.  I mean to say, here am I, a democratically inclined Christian who's supposed to believe in humility and chastity, and yet I lap up the doings of D'Artagnan with his pursuit of Mme. Bonancieux and his readiness to slay on a point of honour, and John Carter with his acceptance of Martian slavery (not surprising in an ex-Confederate soldier) as well as his bloodthirstiness which excelled that of the Frenchman at times.

In both Dumas-land and Barsoom, we are treated to a special kind of splendour which dazzles by its sheer force of character.  The power of great literature can thus create a kind of bubble of acceptance and belief, which lasts as long as we hold the book in our hand.  It's more than a case of "making allowances".  I actually don't want D'Artagnan or Carter to "reform"; I want them just as they are.  Can anyone work that out?  I can't - it's just how it is.

I would add, though, that there are other voices in Dumas, apart from that of D'Artagnan (who, by the way, was a real historical person).  There is the more philosophical Athos, whose reflections upon history in The Man in the Iron Mask I found most memorable.  And there is the more politically "activist" Aramis - a  rather mysterious character.

For me, the Dumas novels aren't "standalone" books - I would not have enjoyed them nearly so much if I had not already known something about seventeenth-century France and been interested in that place and period.  However, that's not at all a criticism of the books.  You might call them sequels to reality.  That's fair enough.

And be it noted that for some of the characters in Heinlein's Universe, The Three Musqueteers was a standalone book.  Here we have people, mutants, on a generation-starship gone wrong, who have forgotten it is a ship and think it is the world.  They have no chance at all of understanding what Earth was, or what any real planet is like.  But they have books on board, and they read them as well as they can.  The tales mean something - goodness only knows what - to these lost space-farers.  I find that moving, and especially their quotation in extremity of the phrase, "All for one and one for all".

2017 March 21st:  

ANOTHER MYSTERIOUS ANCIENT TERRAN REALM

It's occurred to me since writing yesterday's Diary that I might be accused of undue nationalist bias, even of harbouring the ridiculous belief that Brits are better than other people. Actually, it's just that I know more about my own country than about others - naturally enough.

However, let me now write about another country.  I am inspired by Clark Ashton Smith's wonderful Averoigne tales to display some French millennial date-resonances in the same format as those I showed yesterday for Britain.  They're harder to find, as my knowledge is more patchy, but here goes:

629, "le bon roi Dagobert" (see the song) becomes the last powerful Merovingian King of the Franks; 1629, the rebellion of the Huguenots is brought to an end by Louis XIII's government (this is an important date, when the Huguenots lost their state-within-a-state but for the time being retained their religious freedom).

778, a part of Charlemagne's army is ambushed in Roncevaux Pass by the Basques (greatly distorted legends of this incident eventually inspire the Chanson de Roland).  1778, death of the renowned philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

814, death of Charlemagne; 1814, abdication of Napoleon.  (Amazing imperial resonance there!)

Sorry, can't think of any more.  It would be good for such millennial date-rhyming if I could find some notable French events of AD 1511 (to match the accession of Clovis in 511) or 1987 (to match the accession of Hugh Capet in 987) - or conversely of AD 870, 914, 940, 962, 968, 970... to match those of 1870, etc, etc.

Anyhow, maybe my French readers (who've been silent so far) can chip in here.

No doubt about it, Earth is quite a planet. 

2017 March 20th:  

WHIMSIES OF TERRAN HISTORY - A MYSTERIOUS ISLAND

In the page on Star's Reach, I have discussed the theme of Earth's graduation to the rank of hauntingly ancient and mysterious planet.  It's an added interest that the book is set in America, thus showing the "New World" becoming old - a fascinating process we can slowly witness occurring in real life, as America acquires more layers of tradition and history over time.

Meanwhile, what of the ancient island on which I live?  Whimsy makes me suggest that Britain may become to America what Sotar was to Zothique...

Not looking ahead quite so far, I want to share some cute 1,000-year resonances with my readers.  For the history of Britain is long enough for many date-pairings a millennium apart.

Examples: 

642: death of the great St Oswald, King of Northumbria, in battle against the pagan Penda of Mercia; 1642, beginning of the English Civil War.

685, the defeat of the Northumbrians by the Picts; 1685, the defeat of Monmouth's rebellion by the forces loyal to James II.

In 878 King Alfred was hiding in the Somerset marshes, preparing his counter-stroke against the Danes; in 1878 Prime Minister Disraeli was enjoying his triumph at the Congress of Berlin, winning praise from Bismarck.

939, death of Athelstan, King of the English; 1939, Britain enters the Second World War.

954, the absorption of Viking York into the Kingdom of England; 1954, end of rationing, and Bannister runs the four-minute mile.

I could go on...  Most of these resonances are bound to be like the assonances in poetical rhyme - devoid of strict logical connection, and memorable merely because of some trans-logical "music".  But one at least of them provides a contrast which is thematically apt:

1016 - England succumbs to foreign domination under Cnut.

2016 - the vote for BREXIT...

I wonder what we'll do in 3016?

2017 March 19th:  

THE NEEDLE SWINGS ON SASSOOM

I've never gone treasure-hunting; never used a metal-detector.  I have no idea what the indicators on such a gadget look like, and I would not be surprised if, in this digital age, things like dials with swinging needles are passé.  Never mind - I feel a metaphor coming on and am determined to employ the sudden dramatic veer of a detector needle in my figure of speech.

The "treasure" we're looking for here is - as always - an understanding of the X factor in our sub-genre of literature.  What makes it tick?  There isn't just one answer.  There are various lodes... veins of ore...  mascons of truth.

One of these, which gets the needle on my detector swinging, and which is just asking to be dug up and investigated, belongs to that class of lodes which emit gawions proclaiming:  "Here I am, a contradiction that works!  Something strange and powerful is going on here!"

The contradiction in this particular Lode is as follows:

"Look at the let-down you experience when you come across Astor's mention of pine-trees on Jupiter" (see yesterday's Diary).  "Imagine what a let-down it would have been, if Burroughs had had any items of Earth flora or fauna on his Jupiter.  Immediately it would have spoiled the literary magic.  Yet this same literary magic was not spoiled by the presence of the human Savators on that same ERBian Jupiter.  That world - Sassoom - embodies the same contradiction as Barsoom and Amtor: namely, an alien world with alien flora and fauna, yet also with humans, who are genetically unrelated to us yet capable of interbreeding with us.  A massive contradiction which somehow, in story terms, works."

Stid:  You may say it works, Zendexor, but a lot of more discriminating intellects would say it doesn't; they'd say that, far from "working", the contradiction you mention makes it impossible to take these tales seriously.

Zendexor:  You're entirely missing the point, Stid.  You're actually underestimating the contradiction.  Nobody expects science-fantasy to possess scientific accuracy, but like all forms of literature it depends upon a certain imaginative and emotional coherence.  The mystery here is how such coherence can allow the same reader to feel (a) let-down by natively evolved Jovian pines and (b) not let-down by natively evolved Jovian humans.

Harlei:  Look, Zendexor!  Your detector needle is swinging madly!

Zendexor:  Yes, because we're now standing directly on the patch where the treasure is hid.  This, therefore, is where we need to dig.  Dig deep and uncover the principle which is allowing humanity to be an exception as far as peopling alien worlds is concerned.  For in our analysis of our own emotions - which is the way we progress in this empirical science of OSS criticism - we have found that the Burroughs formula works, but we don't know exactly how.  The answer lies somewhere here, in this particular area of our minds...  so here goes: out with your spades, folks.

2017 March 18th:  

JOVIAN FLORA: SINGING PLANTS YES, PINE TREES NO

I'm currently ploughing through one of the worst-written books in history, John Jacob Astor's A Journey in Other Worlds (1894).  I find it's worth the effort, because its ideas, and its place in the historical stream of sf literature, cannot fail to be interesting.  Here after all is a work published just before the proper dawn of our genre; it is therefore in some respects a crepuscular or penumbral entity straddling the pastward borderline of OSS tradition.  One doesn't read such a book for normal reasons of entertainment but rather for curiosity's sake.  In my case, I wanted above all to know how the planets were portrayed in fiction in the year 1894. 

Well, it's been worth it, to learn so much about the Jupiter of that year. 

It's a bit like the Mars of Gustave Le Rouge's duology of 1908-9, insofar as the supposedly alien planet has some animal and plant life-forms which seem more or less identical with those of Earth - a big disappointment for the reader - while it also contains some genuinely alien forms.

In Astor's Jupiter we have, on the credit side, the singing plants, whereas on the debit side we have copycat dinosaurs like those in Earth's past, and (this is a real let-down) pine trees.

One point in Astor's favour: though the climate and atmosphere of his Jupiter are Earth-like, he nevertheless takes the gravitational difference seriously.  He seems interested in the geophysical implications of a high-gravity world.

2017 March 17th:  

2017 March 16th:  

THE VODARO ALLOTMENT

No, that isn't the title of a Robert Ludlum thriller.

I'm just continuing yesterday's somewhat fevered speculations...

Up till now I have been thinking of reality-engineering as a finished act, with regard to its consequences rather than to its initial implementation.

But the decision-making that goes into could, in itself, furnish the plot for an epic.

Imagine a far-future society in which men have acquired almost god-like powers, like the pocket-universe-creating Lords in Philip José Farmer's World of the Tiers series, or like the pseudo-Hindu pantheon in Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light.  Only, the powers would be even greater than those shown by Farmer's and Zelazny's protagonists, in that they'd involve the retrospective grafting of a "new" past onto history, so that what they create has, "afterwards", always been.  (New verb tenses needed here!)

Now, imagine the debates preceding this action.  Imagine how policies might be thrashed out.

"We want a lush Venus."  "Right - let's have the Sea of Morning Opals."  "The deadly, beguiling plants found by Hotar and Evidon."  "Some of the floating islands of Tor and Tinidril's realm."  "Hang on - don't forget to fit in the giant trees of Vepaja."

Imagine the trade-offs, the wheeler-dealing amongst the reality engineers...  There wouldn't be room for everything, but there'd be room for a lot.  Cloudily mysterious Venus is more amenable to multifariousness than a transparent-aired world like Mars.  Both planets are, of course, planets of mystery.  But whereas Mars is more unifiable, because its vistas are clearer, Venus can be almost several worlds in one, as Carson Napier found in his wanderings.  On Mars you do, of course, get lost cities and remote valleys harbouring unsuspected civilizations; Kamtol, Horz...  But on Venus you can come across whole unknown continents. 

As Carson says to himself, after inventing a story that he is from the continent of Vodaro:

...I remembered having seen a land mass called Vodaro on one of Danus' maps.  It extended from the southern edge of the south temperate zone into the terra incognita of the antarctic.  Danus said that little was known of it.  I hoped that nothing was known of it.  Nothing less than I knew of it could be known.

2017 March 15th:   

MAKING USE OF A USELESS PLANET

I think it was Larry Niven in A World Out of Time who makes one of his characters dismiss Venus exasperatedly as "that useless planet".  And from a realistic point of view one can see his point.  An almost Earth-sized world, but uninhabitable, with an atmospheric pressure of 90 bars, temperatures in the hundreds...  All right, it just might be possible that there is microbial life floating in the upper atmosphere.  But still - how much further can you get from the lush Venus of the Old Solar System?

And then I think also of the Outer Planets, the giant worlds on which we can never set foot...  and that brings to mind the "reality engineering" which (in the future envisaged by Robert Gibson) will one day improve Uranus as Ooranye.

These thoughts lead me to reflect that if ever our species does advance to the fantastic level at which reality engineering - retrospective grafting of a better past - becomes possible, then, rather than the gas giants, it might be Venus where the process is tried.  I am suggesting Venus might be the candidate world for the first attempt, because of its nearness and because, for all its faults, it is at least solid.

Of course these are scarcely believable ideas.  But just supposing our species survives for many hundreds of thousands of years, and solves all its practical problems, yet still does not manage to achieve interstellar travel.  In such a case, we would be strongly motivated to make the best of our Solar System.  And rather than mere terraforming, "making the best" might by that time come to mean something more ambitious.  Our remote successors might be more picky.  They might want a greater variety than would ensue from the "terraforming" attitude.  They might look back for more varied inspiration.  Back, back through time...  to the literature of the Old Solar System!

In which case, what we read, and write, might have its effect upon decision-making, and upon reality, in the far future.

For it might be a rule that "if you can think of it, it will one day happen..."

2017 March 14th:  

DAFT-PLOT TOLERANCE

Yesterday I discussed the power some spinners of yarns have, of bamboozling us gravitationally.

Another sign of greatness - and another display of GAWI - is when an author gets us to enjoy a book with a ridiculous or incoherent plot.

Let me stress that I am not being ironical here.  I really mean it when I say, that great writers can show their strength by their failures: provided that the failures in one area of their art are made good by successes in another. 

And it sometimes happens that they achieve this compensation so effectively, that we even get to feel fond of the failure - as though it were the other side of the coin of success.

I'm thinking of Dreadful Sanctuary (1948) by Eric Frank Russell.

I've read and enjoyed this novel many times.  It is fun - exuberant fun.  But I have to shunt it into a sort of "parallel universe" in which plots don't have to make much sense. 

The pivot of the story, though not one of the main characters, is a "mighty-domed old dodderer" named Horowitz, who establishes some kind of ascendancy over a set of people who call themselves the Norman Club, Norman being short for Normal-Men, sane men - who claim to be transplanted Martians.

I'll leave it at that.  Believe me, once you've read the book (and, I trust, enjoyed its rollicking style and classic Russell humour), you'll be asking yourself questions like, how the heck did this Norman Club get started, what was the point of it all, et cetera.

The conspiracy is formidable, technologically as well as politically - they have a special weapon, a sort of coagulator that causes blood-clots, which is obviously the fruit of a unique line of research.  But the more impressive the conspiracy, the harder it is to understand what really keeps it going.  At least, I find it hard.  But perhaps one of you can explain it to me.

These objections only occurred to me many years after first reading the book.  At first I was captivated, bamboozled, infatuated by the tale's sheer vim and vigour.  Also it's tempting to freeze-frame the action at those points where the likeable hero, John J Armstrong, a tough yet reflective character, is tempted to see truth behind the "Norman" assertion that Earthlings are nuts.  I particularly like the scene in the cinema, where an advert for a new juke box gets the audience freaking out with "Runny Runbaken's Runnerbeans playing Skiddin' with My Shiver-Kid".

2017 March 13th:  

SUSPENSION OF GRAVITATIONAL DISBELIEF

What links Burroughs' The Moon Men, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Brackett's The Lake of the Gone-Forever?

(Apart from the fact that they're all good.)

Burroughs has his Lunarians invade Earth with no apparent ill-effects from the six-fold increase in gravity.

Kubrick's film has outdoor scenes on the Moon in which men in spacesuits hop around with realistic slowness, but then has indoor scenes on the Moon in which people walk around in a fashion that looks quite normal for those under Earth gravity.

Brackett's tale is set on an asteroid, where the gravity must be minuscule, yet people's movements again seem Earth-normal.

In all of this, I'm not criticising, I'm admiring - in a state of wonderment, as to how our minds work to ignore the impossible in these particularly blatant cases.

For surely there is something fundamental about gravity.  One would think that to get it so drastically wrong must wreck a story.  And yet it doesn't.  So - some greater power must be maintaining the imaginative credibility of the stories.

I think there must be a "fifth column" inside our brains which is determined to co-operate with the bamboozling power of a tale, provided the said tale is sufficiently well provided with other virtues.

This "fifth column" churns out subliminal excuses at so rapid a rate, that it would cost our conscious minds a great deal of effort to pin the process down.  But let me try, for example in the case of The Lake of the Gone-Forever.

The excuses might work on these lines:

There could be different sorts of gravity.  (Actually, this reminds me of some of the ideas in The Arc of Iapetus.)  Little asteroids might have a gravity based on their peculiar cultural status - a kind of mind-over-matter thing, whereby small worlds have a localised pull, which does not affect the System as a whole in the way "normal" gravity would.

There, you see!  I'm doing Leigh Brackett's work for her!  That's how a great writer gets away with things - sweeping along in her visionary fashion and letting the humble reader follow in her train, bearing the excuses...  "bearing her needments at his back", as the dwarf in Spenser's Faerie Queene does for Una.

2017 March 12th:  

AN OBSCURE GEM FROM 1940

I shall probably never get round to cataloguing the stories in my shelf-full of sf magazines.  If I do ever manage it, I'll find it convenient to know precisely what the collection contains, and be able to lay hands on any story I want.  On the other hand, I'll lose the current sense that unknown treasures lurk.

They do definitely lurk.  Every now and then I make a heartwarming discovery.  Yesterday evening, for instance, as I browsed among my issues of Thrilling Wonder Stories, I came across a tale I can't remember having read or seen before.  It's Red Moon, by Frank Belknap Long Jr, in the June 1940 issue.  The tale is quite short (about ten pulp-magazine pages), but generous.  It provides the reader with domination of Earth and many other worlds by impressively fearsome Martian brains, plus a refuge for free Earthmen on the Uranian satellite Titania (the "Red Moon" of the title), plus a space-faring creature which attacks ships in the void!  Classic stuff, and written with vigor and - in some spots - with considerable literary skill.

2017 March 11th:  

CLARKE CLINGS

Arthur C Clarke's Transit of Earth was published in Playboy magazine, January 1971.  This was shortly before the Mariner 9 probe reached Mars, in November of that same year.  Clarke therefore was writing between the flyby missions (Mariners 4, 6 and 7) and the first orbital mission - in other words, at a time when our views of Mars had touched rock bottom as far as hope for life was concerned.  The flybys appeared to show that Mars was geologically dead, like the Moon, whereas Mariner 9 was to reveal a geologically varied world, with a lingering potential for life. 

It's intriguing to note how Clarke, realist though he is, feels the pull of wishful thinking.  He wants to squeeze the last drop of hope out of the apparently lifeless view of Mars.

...That strange group of rocks - the Elephant, the Capitol, the Bishop - still holds its secrets, and teases me with the memory of our first big disappointment.  We could have sworn that they were sedimentary; how eagerly we rushed out to look for fossils!  Even now, we don't know what formed that outcropping...

2017 March 10th:  

COSMIC DISGUISES AND IDENTITY-SHIFTS

Getting excited by John Greer's remarks in But Is It NOSS? - I want to sort out some ideas and terminology.  Being keen on "reality creep" or "reality engineering" as in Robert Gibson's Valeddom and Uranian Gleams, and at the same time enthusiastic about Greer's self-disguising Iruwon/Mars, I want to stress that we have two separate themes here.  Or rather, two authors and three themes.  Let's list them.

In Valeddom, as I understand it, we have "reality creep" - a blindly malevolent degradation of worlds, a kind of mindless version of the intelligent disguise in Greer's plot, except that it involves a real change rather than a cloaking illusion.

In Uranian Gleams, we have "reality engineering", or its aftermath: a truer-than-now version of Uranus brought into being or "fostered" by the unimaginable powers of the 36th century.

And in Iruwon we have "reality disguise", quite different from both of the above, insofar as the world does not change its nature - merely the perception of that nature.  Greer's plot therefore is "hard" science fiction, really - since it gives us good reason to believe that the traditional inhabited Mars is actual hard reality.  It's just a technical matter of fooling our instruments.  After all, it wasn't that long ago that reputable scientists believed there might be intelligent life on Mars.  I seem to remember that Shklovsky, who co-authored Intelligent Life in the Universe with Carl Sagan, at one time believed that Phobos might be an artificial satellite put up into orbit by the Martians.

So there are the three labels I'm offering.  And the concepts to which they refer are, in turn, quite distinct from the options we get from S M Stirling and Michael J Martinez.  And they in turn are different from one another...

Stirling's is an "alternative reality" OSS - there's no suggestion in Stirling that there is any scheme of things other than the one in his book.  No chance of a cross-over, no way of straddling two cosmoses.  You read his books and enter his version of reality and accept it as the reality until you put the book down.

And that, in turn, is different from the "parallel realities" in Martinez' Daedalus series, where you do have cross-overs.

What an abundance - reality-creep, reality-engineering, reality-disguise, alternative reality and parallel reality.  5 cans of literary soup with different yummy ingredients.

Does anyone wish to amend, refine or augment this list of terms?

2017 March 9th:  

ARE DEFINITIONS USELESS ANYWAY?

Having recently expended some thought on trying to set down criteria for an ideal OSS series, I now pause to think about how useful definitions are.

I think of the recent (2006) hoo-ha when Pluto was "demoted" from "planet" to "dwarf planet".

Pluto is just the same now as it was before 2006.  It was re-defined not for what it was but for what other bodies were discovered to be.

Fair enough, in one sense.  Similarly, Ceres was defined as a planet when first discovered - in 1801 - and only became an "asteroid" when it became apparent that there were too many other tiny "planets" of that sort, a whole belt of them between Mars and Jupiter.  Again, a question of perspective.  If Ceres had been the only port of call between Mars and Jupiter it would have been thought of not as an "asteroid" but as a planet - albeit the smallest one.

But the real problem is more than one of perspective.

"Planet" is a category which we invented in the first place.  It really makes no sense to ask, "what is a planet?"  A planet is whatever we decide is a planet!  Nature does not furnish her products with titles or name-tags.

This drives me towards thinking that the definition of a planet is cultural.  Being thought of, traditionally, as a planet, makes Pluto a planet, no matter what the IAU may say.

Similarly, when stellar proper motions eventually cause stars to cross their IAU-agreed constellation boundaries a few centuries hence, I vote we continue to call the stars by their traditional designations, even if Alpha Whatever has crossed over into the zone of Alpha Somethingelse.

Now, about the OSS.  The definition of the genre must include some emotional as well as logical boundaries.  This, I think, is why I hesitate to include the Daedalus series in the main sub-genre.  But it's a qualitative judgement, not a logical one, that makes me stipulate that the laws of nature ought to be more or less the same as the ones we know for the story to count as OSS.  (Explicitly, that is.  Of course OSS stories contravene nature in all sorts of ways, but not according to the story itself.  That is what makes Daedalus different - the story actually is about a dimension with different laws.)

The cultural drag-anchor that makes me still call Pluto a planet, makes me ascribe this rule about the laws of nature to OSS tales.

To re-iterate: I am not saying OSS science must be possible.  Of course much of it definitely is not.  Conversely, I am not saying the Daedalus science is impossible.  In fact I think it quite possible.  It's not a question of whether it's possible, but of whether it's sufficiently traditional for genre continuity.

I suggest we view the Daedalus series as part of a new subgenre budding off from the OSS.  We need a new name for it.  Like the astronomers of the nineteenth century had to invent the term "asteroid"...

2017 March 8th:  

COLOURISING

You know how sometimes an old black-and-white film is "colourised" so that it can be reissued with the extra "realism" of the added colours?

I doubt there's much point in doing it with classic films.  Who'd want to watch a "colourised" version of High Noon or The Maltese Falcon?  The black-and-white is part of the atmosphere.

However, I begin to wonder if some almost-good OSS tales could be... not "colourised" but somehow deepened.

Take a novel which has some good things going for it, but which is disappointing in many respects.  Could it not be re-done in the spirit of the author yet with added closeness to what it ought to have been?

How, you may ask, can one judge what "ought to have been"?

Well, how can one dare to do anything, for that matter?  We just need an arrogant author who thinks he knows best and happens to be a genius too.  Some film remakes are good, after all. 

One candidate for this treatment I think is Doc Smith's Spacehounds of IPC.  It's not so good that tinkering with it would be lèse-majesté, yet it's good enough to make the effort tempting.

Er - I've just thought of a problem. 

The genius author isn't going to bother with "remakes" - he's going to be producing original works of his own.  He'll leave the "colourising" to second-raters.

Clunking Callisto!  This scuppers the whole idea.

Ah, but wait.  The genius may want a rest every now and then, and just have a bit of light fun.  It just might be possible, then, that some day someone may toss off an enhanced, melliflously stylistic, de-lectured Spacehounds of IPC...

2017 March 7th:  

A TUG-OF-WAR BETWEEN INCOMPATIBLE VIRTUES

The following remarks apply to all adventure stories, not just those set in the Old Solar System, but perhaps they are especially apt for OSS scenes.

A series of adventure tales has to be set in a sufficiently basic environment to include peril and uncertainty and mystery.  That means there's a "pull" towards primitiveness.

At the same time, to make the story's settings interesting, there's an opposite pull - towards developed and sophisticated societies.

The bridge between these two opposites is the need for mystery.  In order for there to be mystery, there has to be something advanced enough to create the mystery. 

How, then, can a society be advanced enough to create mystery while being primitive enough to allow adventure?

That's the tightrope which authors must walk.  In practice the problem is solved by secretive advancement.

The Llari in Brackett's Enchantress of Venus, or the Shandakorians in her fine old Mars tale about that city, have advanced and sophisticated powers, but keep them to themselves.  It's up to an outsider to venture into their zone and penetrate the mystery.

I can also consider Barsoom in this context.  I feel that there is perhaps an illusion to which readers are prone when reading the Barsoom stories.  The outgoing mentality of the people of that version of Mars is so impressive, their zest for life so great, their whole civilization so colourful, that one is perhaps misled into thinking it is stronger than it really is.  Perhaps the Barsoomians are merely hanging on by the skin of their teeth in a largely adverse environment.  In which case, they're not so much a successful global society as a patchwork of local mysteries, albeit with more mutual contact than the cities of Brackett's Mars or the states of Burroughs' Amtor.  Barsoom, therefore, can also be made to fit the "local secretiveness" pattern.  This is most obvious in the case of the kaldanes, and the people of Horz, and other isolationists of that sort.

A different solution is achieved by Robert Gibson in Uranian Gleams.  Gibson is free to use sheer distance as an isolating factor, for Ooranye's diameter is over three times that of Earth - and about six times that of Mars.  Its surface area is therefore about ten times that of Earth and almost forty times that of Mars...  so even though the Uranians are very advanced, they have plenty of scope for adventurous inter-city voyaging...

Which just goes to show how important it is, that writers should take to exploiting the under-used possibilities of the giant worlds in our System.

2017 March 6th:  

PARAMETERS OF AN IDEAL

I wonder if one might compose a list of ideal characteristics of an OSS series.  Here are some thoughts:

(1)  It should be roomy and ramshackle, rather like a Solar System equivalent of James Schmitz' superb "Hub" milieu.  (No rigid political unities, no totalitarian System-wide tyrannies to cramp adventurers' styles.)

(2)  It should not depend upon the suppression of Earth - e.g. if Mars and Venus are colonized, it should not be because Earth has been made uninhabitable.  That unfortunately precludes the masterpieces of the Kuttner-Moore Venus.)  Earth, in other words, must be allowed its place among the planets.

(3)  No spoil-sport science.  The various worlds should be inhabited by natives as well as by Earth colonists or adventurers.  (The Earthlings may or may not be able to breathe the air but they should be fairly free to move around.)  Maybe one might make an exception and allow some uninhabited asteroids.  Geophysical generosity should allow Mercury its Twilight Belt, and the giant planets should be accessible - should have solid surfaces.  Some of the bigger asteroids must be allowed to have thin atmospheres.  Pluto (needless to say) must count as a planet.

(4)  No COMOLD.

What do readers think?  Any amendments necessary, any other stipulations?  Have I got the four main criteria here?

This is just a fun list, of course.  One wouldn't want authors to suppress good ideas just because they overstep the boundaries laid down.  We don't want to be like the Academy Française or whoever it was who thought up the "unities" of classical drama!

[Note added 7th March: for a response to the above see A Fifth Parameter.]

2017 March 5th:   

JUST INSIDE THE BORDERLINE

OSS but only just - squeezing into the category - there is a two-volume tale which has a Mars and Venus that are quite orthodox, but an Earth which exerts power over them in a somewhat anachronistic manner.

There's the topology of it, you see.  Beyond Pluto, it's quite chilly, and you have to go around in warm furs.  No talk of frozen-solid atmospheres or liquid helium or anything too extreme like that.  It's just rather nippy out there, enough to discourage civilization. 

Well - the title of the comic is, after all, Fantastic Stories.

One can argue about how much a reader ought to be prepared to accept, of this sort of thing.  My view is that stories which are only topologically accurate without being quantitatively accurate can still be fun.  What would definitely not work, in any literary sense whatsoever, is a story which tried to pass off a world on the fringe of the System as warmer than Earth.

Unless, of course, that outrageous fact was the main point of the story... e.g. a world heated by some mysterious internal source.  Or existing in an as-yet unsuspected belt of strange heat-giving radiation encircling the Sun at about 40 AU...

Goodness, this suspension-of-disbelief business is complicated...

2017 March 2nd:  

CYCLICAL OSS

Today I saw to the Zones Cup, which Mars has won again - to my lack of surprise.  The Martians are the site's superpower at the moment, but who knows what turn of Fortune's Wheel lies ahead?  And more seriously, what about the possibilities of great fiction, embodying a long-term cycle of the Solar System's history?

It has happened in Earth fiction: the destiny of the far future arching round to resonate with the far past.  Two examples come to mind: 

In The Book of Ptath by A E van Vogt, set 200 million years in our future, a super-continent called "Gonwonlane" recalls the ancient Gondwanaland; while in Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique cycle, the correspondence is ideological rather than geographical - the far-future return to magic and to antique social structures.

Both ideas make sense.  Continental drift will eventually re-create a super-continent.  And as for future medievalism - when the planet's resources are depleted, when metal is scarce and industry virtually impossible, the scenario seems eminently reasonable!

But what about the other worlds?

Here I have one suggestion to offer.  Bear in mind that for OSS literature the role of scientific truth is to provide props and (as it were) colourful ideological costumery, rather than a rigidly prescriptive logic.  It's a sort of topology of the mind.  So - how about using the general idea of the future heating of the Sun, to imagine a correspondence between the far past and the far future of the gas giant worlds?

For example one could have a story in which the Jupiter of the distant past, still hot, warms its satellites and allows life there.  Then the planet cools and they freeze and the life goes into abeyance - a hibernation of some sort, perhaps in some dimensional refuge, lasting gigayears.

Then the expanding red-giant Sun warms the outer Solar System and the worlds stir with re-awakened life...

2017 March 1st:  

SITE SURGE

I may not have time for a normal diary entry because the end-of-month stats will keep me busy.  But - I shall at least announce the good news, that after two mediocre months the usage of the site surged in February.  It was a record month for users (1,090), visits (3,774) and page views (9,919). 

The top ten most popular pages in February, with their number of views, were:

1.  Home page  1,490
2.  OSS Diary  520
3.  Clark Ashton Smith  309 (this is an amazing surge over last month's total of 91,
          and is especially gratifying for a CAS fan like me)
4.  Man of the World  296  (well done Robert Gibson)
5.  Archives of the Moon  204  (ditto)
6.  What's New?  148
7.  Mars  119  (almost double last month's 61 - what's got into the Martians?  Have they
           discovered how to hypnotize the users?  If so I wish they'd teach me)
8.  Mercury  114
9.  Wanderers of Mars  105 (well done Dylan)
10. The Asteroids  91  (again hurrah - I'm an Asteroid fan)

On the page view winners page I have summed the figures for January and February to display the aggregate viewing figures for all the "super-pages" so far this year.  ("Super-pages" are those with on average one or more views per day.)

Geographical spread of visits:

US 68%   China 8%   Ukraine 6%   Germany and UK 4%   France 3%  
Canada and the Netherlands 2%   Spain and Japan 1%   Others 5%  (the site was viewed from 72 countries altogether).