the sunport vista:
zendexor's
oss
diary

2020

2020 August 24th:   

INVOLUNTARY CREATION OF OSS WORLDS

Suppose that the afterlife is an emanation of the collective unconscious...

He thought: moon.  And he was on the moon.  Faster than light, as fast as thought.  He stood on a silver and black plain; a scene from an imaginative painting...  He let himself drift back into the unconscious...

Don scanned the sky.  Mars!

Quick as thought, faster than light!

He stood on a dim red desert, the thin wind hissing past his ears.  The sea-bottoms of ancient Barsoom?  He turned his head; there in the distance was a ruined city - a tumble of white stone, a movement of the weird hordes of green warriors...

2020 August 18th:   

GIVING THE MOON AN ATMOSPHERE

Two tycoons have each been trying to outwit the other.

"Forests, meadows, grass-lands.  Moon, the green planet!  Trees five hundred feet tall!  We're filling craters with water right now.  Moon, the world of a million lakes!  In five more years we'll have thirteen pounds pressure, and we'll be living out-of-doors."

"Waste, waste, waste," intoned Bray.  "You'll never get a stable atmosphere."

That is indeed the objection.  Even in a culture where matter-transmutation is cheap, how could you stop the mass-produced oxygen just leaking into space under the Moon's feeble gravity?

"But actually, we're building a special kind of atmosphere, rather different from Earth's."

Bray's nostrils flared in interest.  "How so?"

"Well, in the first place, xenon replaces nitrogen.  Specific gravity of 4.5, as against 1 for nitrogen.  Then we're using the heaviest possible isotopes for oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, and deuterium rather than hydrogen fro our water.  It all works out to a pretty dense atmosphere - physiologically identical to Earth air, but about three and a half times as dense.  So our vapor loss into space will be minimized to almost nothing."

- Jack Vance, "Dover Spargill's Ghastly Floater" (The Dark Side of the Moon, 1986)

The idea makes one wonder, what might be done, on these lines, for the asteroids.

You might object that their gravitation pulls are so minute that the idea wouldn't work.  But in the OSS, what I am tempted to call "topological science" prevails, in which quantities don't matter so much as mere nods of respect in the right direction.  Thus, Pluto has got to be cold, but it need be no more than Arctic cold, so that Captain Future and his crew can deal with the conditions there by wearing fur coats...

2020 August 5th:   

ADDING REDDIT POSTS

Bit by bit, item by item, for the sake of completeness I aim to adapt my recent series of posts on the reddit worldbuilding site to a page on this site.

I thought it best to add the material to the end of an existing page, namely, An approach to world-building.  The items from reddit will thus form a series of appendices to that page. 

It's more appropriate to put them there, than to add them to this Diary.  The Diary is mostly about other people's works, whereas the Approach page, and the reddit posts, are focused mainly upon my own efforts at writing.  Some overlap is inevitable but the overall difference in bias is fairly distinct.

2020 August 4th:   

YE OLD URANIAN WEBSITE

Yesterday, by some chance, I accessed www.ooranye.com, and changed my mind about it.

It's an early, comparatively amateurish effort but in some ways it's not that bad.  To any reader who happens to be interested in my invented world at all, it's probably worth a look because it provides information not available elsewhere.

In particular, planetological information.  Ooranography, flora, fauna, cultures.

The history narrative is there, too, but in an earlier, less-full version than in Uranian Gleams, and the same is true of the stories, so readers are advised to obtain a copy of the published book for those.  Where www.ooranye.com scores over the book is in the descriptive "geographical" coverage.

It's rather a pity that I've left it so late to say all this.  The plodding, slow-on-the-uptake side of me has led me to neglect a resource which took me years to build up.  Anyhow, better late than never.  I'm putting links to the old website on every relevant page from now on.

One more point needs to be made: I built the old site using a system (called PageCraft) which I can no longer access, and I lack the know-how to carry out amendments directly using html and the files; in fact I don't suppose I any longer have the files.  Therefore www.ooranye.com must permanently stay like it is, warts and all, frozen, static; which is partly why I half-forgot about it.  Fortunately, such fossilization is not true of its successor!

[Later note, added 14.12.2021: the site www.ooranye.com has been discontinued and all necessary material transferred to A Survey of Ooranye and hemisphere maps.]

2020 July 5th:   

A MARTIAN TRAIT - BRAIN-SWAPPING SURGERY

It has come to my notice that brain-transplantation is not just a skill developed by Ras Thavas, The Master Mind of Mars, in the Barsoomian adventure of that name (published in 1927).  As well as Burroughs' treatment of the theme, Edmond Hamilton has a Martian surgeon perform the same kind of brain-swap in Doom Over Venus (Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1940).

I dare say Hamilton may have been influenced by Burroughs, though the idea of brain-swapping surgery is part of sf's general store of ideas.  But it wasn't necessary for Hamilton's story that the surgeon be a Martian.  Doom Over Venus is a tale with a multi-planet cast of characters, ranging from Mercurians to Saturnians.  The plot did not require that the surgeon come from the Red Planet.

The fact that he did come from there, shows the kind of pull towards overlap which accumulates the character of a world.

One more brick in the edifice of tradition...

2020 June 16th:   

ANOTHER NHOSS NOVEL

A fellow-reader has alerted me to the existence of an interplanetary thriller set in the year 1899, The Martian Ambassador by one Alan K Baker. 

It's wonderful how that sub-genre seems to be proliferating...  Some day I must get round to doing a full-blown NHOSS page.  Unless some helpful person steps in and does it for me.

2020 April 27th:   

JAMIE ROSS

Stunningly sad news came to me in an email this morning from Jamie's wife Laurie:

Jamie died on Wednesday the 22nd, unexpectedly, of liver failure.  Neither he nor Laurie had been told how serious his condition was.

Readers will appreciate something of how big a loss this is to our field.  Jamie's articles and stories evince a rare combination of space-scientist, engineer and writer with an imagination that could build the kind of worlds we OSS fans like best.  His most recent story The Magistrate is currently the most popular piece of fiction on this site.  I was greatly looking forward to his promised next item in The Lúthian Chronicles, which was to have been a Ganymedean tale.

The sort of guy, in short, whom one wishes one had known better - now that it's too late.

2020 March 30th:   

A PAIR OF GUIDES TO BARSOOM

Two pleasant books on Burroughs' Mars, which have been in my collection for over four decades, are: A Guide to Barsoom by John Flint Roy, and Barsoom: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision, by Richard A Lupoff - both of which came out in 1976.

Roy's book is organized as a work of reference; its chapters cover the following areas of Barsoomian nature and culture: 1. A Brief History of Pre-Carter Barsoom; 2. Geography/Gazetteer; 3. Biographical dictionary; 4. Flora and Fauna; 5. Measurements; 6. Language, Religion and Customs; 7. General glossary; 8. Quotations, Proverbs and Expletives; 9. Science and Invention; 10. Through Space to Barsoom? (a theory of dimensions, to explain Carter's interplanetary transitions and the nature of Barsoom); 11. a biographical sketch of the fictional ERB and his relations with celebrities such as Carter and Tarzan.

As you can probably guess, this is a great little book to browse in, though the pleasure is bitter-sweet in that one always wants more.

Lupoff's volume is different.  It's more of a critique: a collection of seventeen essays, reflecting upon various aspects of the Barsoom cycle, considered as a work of literature.  It's a pleasant read for the aficionado, because Lupoff shares our sheer delight in the series.  Broadly speaking, though he makes some negative criticisms, their context makes it clear that the message is, "such-and-such are faults in theory, but in practice they don't matter a hoot".

I'll give you one example, from pages 103-4, where Lupoff has been discussing the author's "classism":

...Burroughs offers fleeting glimpses of Martians in many roles and stations of life.  There are flashes of ordinary life in the camps of the green hordes, on the farms of the red Martians, in the inns and eating-houses, the temples, in the laboratories of Barsoomian scientists and the air boats of city patrols.

But these are only glimpses.

John Carter gave little thought to the common man of Mars because Edgar Rice Burroughs gave little thought to the common man of Earth.  In the strange perversity of uncounted good republican Americans he was fascinated by royalty, and loved all of the trappings and ceremonies of court life.

Perhaps it smacked of a nobler and more gracious age than Burroughs' grim twentieth century (or John Carter's tragic, post-bellum nineteenth), a time of higher interests and ambitions and of finer deeds.  But for any reader interested in the lot of the common Martian, there is precious little information available in the entire eleven-volume cycle...

2020 March 29th:   

CELESTIAL INTRUDERS

To plug a gap in the coverage I shall now mention some transient members of the Sun's family.  You can regard them as honorary members of the OSS scene, just as a giant gorilla from Skull Island who climbs up the Empire State Building can in a sense count as an honorary New Yorker for that span of time.

The intrusions occurred in a rich variety of ways:

- callously destructive, as in Fritz Leiber's The Wanderer (1964), in which a "dirigible" alien planet steers into position close to our Moon, causing tidal havoc on Earth;

- criminal, as in Edmond Hamilton's Calling Captain Future (1940, 1967) though here the "Dark Star" intruder is mostly an illusion used by evil Dr Zarro to frighten the System into giving him dictatorial powers;

- allowing momentous temporary contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence, as in Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle's Fifth Planet (1963), in which the star Helios approaches Sol, and its system interpenetrates our outer system, in the year 2087, enabling an expedition to be sent to Helios' planet, Achilles, where the crew get more than they bargained for;

- similarly in Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud (1957), in which the intruder is a gaseous body, an intelligence whose metabolism is sustained by a controlled flow of gas;

- and largely positive, as in Robert L Forward's Dragon's Egg (1980), in which a neutron star approaches close enough to be visited by a Terran scientific expedition, and the development of a civilization of tiny neutronium beings on the star is accidentally accelerated by radiation from our observation modules, mostly to good effect, in a matter of hours (the 'cheela' live a million times faster than we do).

In addition to these I wish to mention a novel which treats of the opposite idea, namely, Earth leaving the Solar System and voyaging into interstellar space: Pohl and Kornbluth's strange but fascinating tale, Wolfbane.  You could call it part of an OSS diaspora... along with Hamilton's rather ridiculous Thundering Worlds, an over-exuberant short story from back in 1934 in which the entire complement of nine planets is steered across the void to a new home.

My favourite of the above five is Fifth Planet; it's one of those novels which I've re-read so many times, I've long ago lost count.  It's excellently written and full of wonder, fascination, depth of characters, profundity of ideas, gripping narrative... what more could anyone want?  To die without having read it would be an absurd fate for any sf fan.  The Black Cloud, much more renowned because of its daring speculation about nebular life, is less haunting, but still a superb read (though lacking the literary polish of the other work).

2020 March 27th:   

PERTURBABLE PROTAGONISTS REQUIRED

I always like to encourage people to read the books I've enjoyed, so that I can have the extra pleasure of discussing them.  As a corollary to that, I am always cautious about pointing out any faults in such works, in case I seem to present a partial view that is mistaken for the whole view, with the result that people are put off...

For instance, take the example of Michael Crichton.  I've read five or six of his works.  One which I didn't manage to finish is Timeline.  Great idea, but he doesn't - in my view - manage the emotional side of it; doesn't handle the astonishment well enough - doesn't give us enough of the natural awe and wonder that must attend the invention or discovery of time-travel / probability travel / whatever you like to call it.  In short, his folk aren't sufficiently surprised.

Now you might say that, from an author's point of view, this is a problem with no solution.  The themes of sf are so mind-boggling that if due attention were paid to the astonishment attendant upon them, the whole tale would be swamped by the bogglement and there'd be no space left for actual narrative.

Well, all I can say to that is, some authors manage to leave the reader satisfied on this point.  Crichton himself sometimes rises to the occasion.  My favourite of his novels is Prey, which is brilliantly plotted and moves to a wonderfully horrific climax.  He does falter once: on page 468:

"It's creepy," I said.

2020 March 26th:   

FOR AN UNWRITTEN TALE OF PLANET X

How about giving our Sun a brown-dwarf companion, somewhere way out on the fringes of the System.  This object might (in OSS terms anyway) provide some heat to sustain life on its companion planets.

One or more of those planets might be really big, perhaps like Ramnua in Poul Anderson's A Stone In Heaven, which used to be a gas-giant until its hydrogen envelope was blown away by a nearby supernova.  (Anderson is great at scientifically-plausible world-building, and though I don't care a fig for strict scientific plausibility, I see no reason to forego its inspirations when it suits me.)

Unlike Ramnua, though, our invented planet X might have an Earth-sized inhabited satellite, on which a race evolved who looked longingly at the big world, wishing they could endure its crushing gravity.  Remember, these people are so far out in the outermost reaches of the System, that they might not even know of the inner planets, lost as those would be in the glare of the Sun.  So, to these folk, their huge primary might be the only possible destination for space travel.  They'd be highly motivated to devise some way of visiting it.

Spurred by this need, they might at last invent some sort of way of controlling gravity.  And then - the big world is theirs.

The adventures one could write!  How would it feel, suddenly to have the opportunity to explore a giant planet, perhaps a tidally locked world of which only one face had ever been seen? 

Room for an epic here.

2020 March 23rd:   

TELEMETRY-BANE

The currently topical theme of isolation (something which most of us are too gregarious to enjoy, most of the time) goes to show yet again that what's good to read about is very different from what's good or convenient to experience.

Mobile phones are so useful, most of us couldn't do without them, but they are a pain for authors who try to write contemporary fiction.  How far would L P Hartley have been able to get with an updated version of The Go-Between in which the amorous protagonists were able simply to phone each other up? 

And in our own sub-genre, think of the classic fictional space voyages.  In Ransom's place in Out of the Silent Planet we would have welcomed a radio link with the authorities back home, but it would have ruined the story.  And what about the effect in Wells' The First Men in the Moon, when the narrator finds that the Selenites have shut him out and the freezing night is falling:

2020 March 22nd:   

1959, THE TWILIGHT ZONE - AND A CALL TO BILL BRYSON

One of my favourite works of American history is Bill Bryson's One Summer, narrating events of the year 1927.  It's full of varied scenes involving Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, Babe Ruth, Sacco and Vanzetti... and so on, all colourful, dramatic, panoramic and unputdownable.

I wish I could meet Bryson, buttonhole him and say, look, this shows what you can do; now do it, please, for 1959 - the year The Twilight Zone series came out!

For the haunting fact is, I keep coming across 1959.  It figured in the previous Diary entry.  It is perhaps the best year for the Old Space Program, since in 1959 one could still (only just) believe in the canals of Mars and a lush jungly or watery Venus, and Mercury still had its Twilight Belt... while the real space program was just getting started, with all its hope and excitement.

And quite apart from all that, The Twilight Zone - with its themes of mystery, bewilderment and paranoia - would provide a field-day opportunity for Bryson to link TV with reality.  I'm not quite sure how (for instance) he would swerve his narrative from TTZ to the Nixon-Kruschev "kitchen debate" and back again, but I bet he'd find a way; such surreal Cold War incidents have the right flavour to blend with the TV series. 

Bill, are you listening by any chance?

2020 March 20th:   

THE HIDDEN SIDE OF THE MOON - 1949 - 1959

Let's again explore one little sector of the frontier that forms the dividing line between the realm of "hope and credulity" (what I call the Zohac) and the realm of "realism".

It's a story published in 1949 and set in 1959, and it appears in a collection edited by Donald Wollheim called Men on the Moon.

A character study, in which Raymond Z Gallun illustrates the contrast between a space-struck youngster, Art Pelsudski, and a professional astronaut, Mel Robbins, uses that contrast to explore the decline of youthful wonder as it is replaced by realistic experience, and in so doing, it voices the last faint hope that there might be air and life on the hidden side of the moon.

"Say - let me wish you luck, Colonel Robbins!  Just think - in four days you'll be looking down on the other side of the Moon, that nobody's ever seen!  An old theory might be right - that the Moon has been drawn out of shape by the constant pull of terrestrial gravity in one direction - it may bulge on the hemisphere which always faces Earth, and be hollowed on the other.  All the air may be cupped there.  There might be lakes and trees and strange cities in a tremendous valley.  Nobody knows..."

"Nobody does," Robbins agreed.

The theory was ancient, weak, and too romantic and pat in the way that its supposed marvels hid behind the unknown.  It was the look in the kid's eyes that interested Mel most.  In it was the worship of great things of metal and power, and the driving love of unreached distance and mystery...

2020 March 14th:   

FROM 1520 TO BARSOOM

We're approaching the 7-24 June quincentenary of the prototype "summit meeting", the splendid junketings of Francis the First and Henry the Eighth at the celebrated Field of the Cloth of Gold.

I reckon that those two kings, slippery customers though they both were, deserved some credit on that occasion, which was at least an attempt to promote peace between the two nations, perhaps with the idea that such summitry would catch on as an alternative to war.  The mood of 1520 didn't last, but it was something.

Rather than search consciously for some profound link between the above and the literature of the Old Solar System, I simply let my usual stream of consciousness waft me where it would, and lo, I arrive at Chapter XXVI of Burroughs' A Princess of Mars.

There, after the city of Zodanga has been sacked by the hero's savage Thark allies - and princess Dejah Thoris of Helium rescued from Zodangan clutches - the Thark chief Tars Tarkas gets to meet Tardos Mors, Jeddak of Helium, to seal a new friendship between the nations.

At this point a really interesting force kicks in.  Call it protagonocracy (rule by main character), or logotechnocracy (rule by author).

Its implications blossom many volumes later.  In Swords of Mars, number eight of the chronicles of Barsoom, the hero, John Carter, his Terran skin-colour disguised, and under a false name, meets the girl Zanda, one of the victims of that sack of Zodanga which he had instigated.  Zanda informs him that she has vowed to kill John Carter....  and as Carter admits later to one of his officers:

"...all her sorrows resulted from the fall of the city.  Her father was killed; and, in grief, her mother took the last long journey upon the bosom of Iss;  so you see she has good reason to hate John Carter, or at least she thinks she has."

Rather than go any further into all the rights and wrongs of it, Burroughs leaves us the readers to make our own adjustments using the scanty clues of context and suggestion, such as the passage quoted above, with the aim of tempting us to be willingly inveigled into seeing it all John Carter's way.  Yes, it's all right to arrange for a city to be sacked if by doing so you rescue a princess.  Honestly, I'm not being ironical here; when visiting his moral dimension I take my hat off to ERB, submit to his power and let him call the tune...

...Just as the lesser folk no doubt cheered the two kings as they revelled on the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

2020 March 8th:   

THE MOST OVER-THE-TOP DYSON-SPHERE SCHEME

Following on from my previous remarks, I feel I should mention one remarkable sf work which applies the Dyson Sphere concept to the Solar System while nevertheless allowing the continued existence of the System's worlds. 

In Colin Kapp's Cageworld series, our nine planets aren't broken up; their orbits are merely enclosed - and, in the most truly mind-bogglingly immense work of engineering which any author has ever imagined, they are enclosed not merely by one Sphere but by one Sphere per world.

Thus, the Sun is enclosed like the core of an onion by concentric layers, each of increasing surface area as one goes outward, and these surfaces are all habitable.  Don't ask me how, or how it works, or how light and air are provided... it's a long time since I read Cageworld Volume 1, and I never finished Volume 2.

The whole project is a clear case of technology getting out of hand - for the construction of the spheres is in the hands of an unstoppable artificial intelligence named ZEUS.  Perhaps the compelling concept of a runaway AI is getting to me, as I've just finished re-reading Michael Crichton's Prey.  I intend fairly soon to give Cageworld another go. 

2020 March 3rd:   

SAVE JUPITER

The recent death of Freeman Dyson, of Dyson Sphere fame, prompts me to issue a warning that it may be necessary some day to form a conservation group to protect the planet Jupiter.  Dyson was speculating on what an advanced interstellar civilization might do, but Adrian Berry in The Next Ten Thousand Years (1976) shifted the argument to this solar system, suggesting that one day we may rip Jupiter apart for material to form a sphere of mini-worlds englobing our Sun, giving us all the total surface area which our giant population might ever need.  And how exactly would we rip Jupiter apart?  By means of some super-engineered centrifugal force, if I remember correctly.  How this could be done without risk of bombarding the rest of the System with lethal impacts, I'm not too sure.  But my objections, needless to say, go beyond health and safety considerations.  I simply don't go in for murdering planets.

I've just re-read an old favourite of mine, Poul Anderson's The Corridors of Time (1965), and it strikes me that the attitude behind Adrian Berry's Jupiter-destroying project fits perfectly with the ethos of the Rangers in Anderson's time war.  He doesn't use the terms "yin" and "yang", but in summary one might say that the Rangers are yang-gone-mad and their opponents, the Wardens, are yin-gone-mad.  The two blocs manoevre for advantage from age to age, each doing their utmost to bolster their own type of culture.  Collateral damage includes the planet Mars, blasted into asteroidal fragments some time in our future, but on Earth the combat is limited to a cloak-and-dagger level.  Evils accumulate, though, and in one episode Anderson gives us a horrifying picture of a super-technological North America some centuries hence.

The above remarks do not come near to conveying the novel's excellence.  Well-drawn characters, ingenious plot, vivid and varied scenes, thoughtful speculation - it's Anderson at his best.

Mind you, he leaves some of the theme's problems in the reader's lap.  The Corridors of Time is one of those time-stories which downplay the problem of reality-change by assuming that the main line of history possesses an inertia which cannot be overcome.  Yet he wants to make the characters' actions and motives meaningful, so he says (in effect) that history can somehow be worked on, exploited, some aspects of it emphasized, albeit not fundamentally changed!  Only superb story-telling lets him get away with this attempted compromise.

The one and only writer who (to my knowledge) did fully tackle the issues of time travel and reality change, is Barrington Bayley in The Fall of Chronopolis (1974). 

As a story-teller Bayley is the equal of Anderson.  Despite the fact that Anderson scores higher as a historical novelist, evocatively weaving scenes from the real past into his work, Bayley is the more daring thinker, the ultimate spine-tingling visionary.  He manages to deal with paradox by first settling another problem: that of sequence.  By this I mean the problem that as soon as you use time-travel you create another arrow of time, orthogonal to the main one: what Asimov calls "physioyears" in The End of Eternity.  In which case, what meaning can the term "the present" still possess?  The answer, according to Bayley, lies in "temporal nodes", a kind of series of present moments, spaced along the time-stream and flowing like wave-fronts over a life-time apart.  Time-craft can travel from node to node with far less energy than is required for a stop between nodes... and that is what allows coherence of cause and effect.

Not that chaos can be staved off forever, even in Bayley's scenario.  Chronopolis must eventually fall...

Which inspires me to advocate another conservation effort:  not only "Hands off Jupiter", but "Down with Time Travel!"

2020 February 28th:   

BIFURCATED SOULS: FRANCE - OSS

For those of you who are used to the way I go on, it shouldn't take many microseconds for you to grasp the connection.

As a French-civilization buff I am often struck by the remarkable co-existence of two "souls of France", the rival splendours of the fleur-de-lys and of the Tricolour: the incompatible glories of Royalist and Republican France. 

(I am of course referring to each of these in their idealized forms, not the grubby reality of quotidian human life.  Though we humans wallow in muck we can still dream our dreams.)

What fascinates me is how the two visions manage to co-exist under the umbrella of the "France" concept, despite their utter opposition to each other.  You can't have Throne and Republic at the same time, obviously.  (All right, the first emperor had on documents "République Française - Empereur Napoléon".  But he was one for having it all.)  Yet though only one side of the question can rule in practice at any one moment, there's a kind of hyper regime in which both soul-characters twine around each other.  Almost as though a new colour is created out of their alternation and admixture. 

Of course I know perfectly well that the French as individuals act as a glue between the visions; for instance, D'Artagnan the royalist and Clemenceau the republican were equally fiery and prone to duelling.  I can imagine them meeting across the gap of centuries and getting on quite well.

Nevertheless, when the overarching concept "France" pops into my mind I find I'm harbouring a sort of shimmering amalgam of impossible combination.  Does this remind the OSS reader of anything?

The contradictory bundle of vision in literary "Mars", and the other contradictory bundle "Venus", in particular?

2020 February 25th:   

LOVECRAFT REVERSED WITH ADDED BELBURY

While anxious not to reveal any spoilers, I feel I can hardly discuss John Michael Greer's The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth (2018) without alluding to the main point, which is, that it's a sort of rehabilitation of HPL's shuddersome big bad beings (BBBs) from Outside. 

The Outside can be in the deeps of the sea or outer space or the mists of Time or beyond our cosmos altogether - the point is to chill the reader's blood with a kind of spiritual agoraphobia.  Greer operates a kind of switch on this pattern. 

Some licence for this reversal can be found in Lovecraft's oeuvre itself, which contains occasional second thoughts on, traces of respect for, and/or empathy with, the star-headed Old Ones in At the Mountains of Madness and the mind-swapping Great Race in A Shadow Out of Time.  Even in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the horror of undergoing a species-change is accompanied by empathy with the way the victim ends up by liking it.

These, as I say, are traces.  Greer goes much further, concocting a thorough re-evaluation whereby his hero actually joins the BBBs' side, with such justifications as are meant to ensure that the reader roots for him rather than feels horrified pity for him.  And so I do.  I'm an obedient reader.  If a tale is well written I succumb to its message and read it in its own terms for the duration.

Now, you may ask, how can the author hope to compensate the horror-fan for the consequent loss of shudders?  Answer: by providing alternative shudders to remedy the shortfall.  This is where "Belbury Hall", and all it stands for, comes into play.  The echo of the Belbury in That Hideous Strength is most apposite.  We're asked to shudder, not at slimy shoggoths or tentacled Deep Ones, but at counter-organic forces reminiscent of the demons in C S Lewis' masterpiece.  And Greer does provide some crucial moments of terror, where he succeeds in making that opposition (dubbed the Radiance) really scary.  (My own reaction, for what it's worth, evoked my childhood fright when reading Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, in which you meet the demon with a blank face... the Terrible Trivium, probably meant as a sort of joke, but one which put the wind up me.)

On the subject of fear, another point needs to be made.  In my view, almost all of Lovecraft is not really scary at all.  Its appeal is in its invitation to a kind of role-play of being scared.  We enjoy the depiction of fear rather than share in it.  To the reader, the merit of the work is not that it frightens but that, by the imaginative sweep of its invention and vision, it awes.  And from the OSS point of view it's all in the very good cause, that it elevates Planet Earth to be the equal of the other eight major System worlds with regard to vistas of discovery and of alien character.  But as for making me as reader look over my shoulder for real - no.

With one exception, perhaps.  The one HPL tale which did scare me as I read it is The Shadow Over Innsmouth.  The suspense-filled plot, its gradual tightening of the net around the doomed hero, did get to me, especially as I was reading it in somewhat crummy Innsmouth-style surroundings at the time.  But by and large I would say that if Greer aims to out-score HPL on palpitations, he's in with a chance.  Whether he or anyone can out-do the old master in myth-making, time will tell; I would guess that HPL has too much of a head start.

Anyhow, the upshot of all this is that I'm sufficiently interested to order the second volume of The Weird of Hali.

2020 February 22nd:   

MULTI-POCKET WORLDS

These are the kind of OSS world in which the reader is taken to one scene after another, each freshly depicted and isolated from the previous one.  There's no overarching culture, just a succession of episodes in various independent milieux.

From the writer's point of view the big problem with this sort of thing must surely be that the isolation of the episodes will tend to detract from the coherent character of the invented world.  In the Old Solar System this problem can be mitigated by the heritage of personality which the world already possesses in literature and legend; nevertheless, it's rare to find an artistically successful multi-pocket OSS world.

I can only think of two outstanding examples. 

One is Stanley Weinbaum's Mars.  In A Martian Odyssey and Valley of Dreams he gives us a version of the Red Planet in which the reader is always expecting a completely new and unrelated scene "over the next hill".  And for some reason, of tone or atmosphere or choice of imagery, it works - every new adventure is thoroughly Martian in inspiration, so that you never cease to feel that you're wandering over the same authentic version of the Red Planet, the Weinbaum Mars, unrelated though the episodes are.

The other instance of a successful multi-pocket world is Edgar Rice Burroughs' Venus.  "Amtor" entirely lacks any general culture.  The inhabitants know only their own area of the planet.  Cultures drastically vary, and you never know what you're going to meet the next time your plane gets shot down or has to land for supplies.  And yet the reader always remains aware of the environment's overarchingly Venusian character.  Partly, no doubt, it's the clouds that help - the ubiquitous sky-cover which helps to confuse navigation and perpetuate the inhabitants' geographical ignorance.  Still, the author's literary achievement is remarkable, as a portrait of the continually unexpected, which nevertheless stops short of chaotic character-dissolution.

The ideal multi-pocket world would be a giant planet in which ecologies evolved altogether out of contact with each other, perhaps in basins of breathable atmosphere separated by vast distances and unbreathably airless highlands.  Then the challenge would be to compose a tale which links several of the pocket-worlds into one narrative while preserving a sense of their isolation. 

Perhaps a culture in one pocket could undertake a kind of "space program" to voyage to another pocket.  Such an adventure would have the wonder of a space voyage while staying on the ground.  There's a bit of an echo of this idea, very briefly, in Perelandra, where Ransom speculates about the Venusians possibly having "submarines on wheels" to explore their permanent Night side, if they have one (it turns out they don't).

So there's an idea for a sub-genre: land-space programs.  Earth's Age of Discovery had something of this character.  But imagine a world so big that an effort to explore it had to be on the scale of the Apollo Project...

2020 February 16th:   

ANOMALIES OF THE BOOK TRADE

Wouldn't you think it was in everyone's interest - publishers, booksellers, and the reading public - to make sure that the best stuff is the most easily available?  Like on a fruit stand, you put the nicest stuff on show (or so I assume).  Maybe the analogy falls down because, with books, the cost of producing them doesn't relate to their literary quality.  It costs no more to print a great novel than to print the same-sized piece of crud.

So - why aren't the most enjoyable classics still around in the shops?  I am thinking on these lines having just browsed in Heinlein's superb Red Planet.  The old master really surpassed himself in that one.  I'm generally not a dyed-in-the-wool Heinlein fan, though I'd be daft not to recognize his stature in the field; but Red Planet is a flawless and hypnotically addictive read, and one of the handful of truly great Mars novels.  In which case - why doesn't one ever see it in a bookshop?  It ought never to go out of print. 

Doubtless, it's much easier now to get hold of a book one wants, but how do bookshop browsers ever get to know the stuff they would want if only they saw it - if they don't see it?

What's needed is an eccentric billionaire who sees the need and supplies the public with new editions of the treats that are currently being missed.

2020 February 13th:   

FLIGHT OVER CERES

I recommend anyone who hasn't seen it yet to view this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJiw2NxqoBU

Thanks to the Dawn probe's encounter with Ceres in 2015, and image processing techniques, digital elevation models and what not, we are treated to a spectacle of the asteroid as if we were swooping past and around it.

The view is so beautiful, I can forgive the Cereans for their coy avoidance of the limelight.  It's understandable they may prefer us to view their world as uninhabited.  Let them hide underground... though they've left mysterious bright traces in Occator Crater.

Another way of looking at it: Ceres really is uninhabited, but the OSS allows for some such worlds, e.g. our Moon.  The lack of organic life yet allows for something else... call it character.  Personality, even.  Some kind of haunting.  Our minds routinely are able to cathect (paint with emotional significance) non-living things; that's why you get some people interested in chemistry, geology, minerology.  The elements and their inter-reactions, the stones and strata, "come alive" for them.

2020 February 9th:   

GOR THE ENEMY OF LONGTAIL

2020 February 8th:   

A FLASH OF AMBITIOUS HOPE IN 1959

Another phenomenon to add to recent instances of the Zohac ("Zone of Hope and Credulity", i.e. the cultural spatio-temporal area-locus of OSS-style belief), is the brief 1959 USAF Project Horizon, a proposal for a military base on the Moon.  Now declassified, its report can be read online.  Skimming down the text, I came across the following optimistic statement:

The payload capabilities of the SATURN family, as well as their timely availability, makes it feasible to land the first two people on the lunar surface by Spring of 1965 and have a 12-man permanent outpost operational by November 1966.

The report went on to aver that no technological breakthroughs would be needed; the aim of a moon-base could be achieved with existing capabilities.  

Well, think of that!  That staple of the old space program, a 1950s-style sf military Moon, with all its connotations of secrecy and mystery, was actually (if briefly) a matter for consideration in real life.

Themes which we may love to hate in fiction - such as ruthless blimps monopolizing the Moon - are less welcome in real life, but I feel a twinge of regret that that 12-man base wasn't established in 1966.  It might have proved more durable, less easy to cancel, than the civilian Apollo Project turned out to be.  We'll never know, of course. 

.  . 

2020 January 29th:   

WATERY LUNAR SEAS

Recently I was given for my birthday Eighty Not Out, the autobiography of Patrick Moore, who was and perhaps still is a household name in my country - television's instantly recognizable astronomer, and an inimitable character.  Reading through the book I found a fascinating passage on Nobel laureate Harold Urey (1893-1981), who, Moore informs me, seriously maintained, well into the Space Age, that the primordial lunar "seas"  may really have been watery rather than lava-filled.  I followed this up online and found that in his "Study of the Ranger Pictures of the Moon" (1967), quoted in Arlin Crotts' Water on the Moon, I. Historical Overview), Urey says:

...they (lunar maria) may have been subjected to water at some time in their history...  

Later the evidence from Apollo missions forced Urey to abandon the watery maria, but the point that intrigues me is the longevity of the idea.  Rather than go into his reasons for having held it when he did, I want to issue an appeal here, for a convenient term to denote the... how can I say it... empire of belief, the boundaries of hope, the zone of credibility, marking out the historical limits of real belief in a more old-fashioned life-friendly Solar System.  I'll go on trying to think up a phrase for it, but meanwhile I'd welcome suggestions - reply on the Facebook page or email me at the usual address, heritageofdreams@aol.com.

So far as I know, Urey himself never talked about native lunar life.  Still, wow, real seas on the Moon - imagine being able to believe that! 

I presume he must have postulated an early lunar atmosphere, thick enough to stop the water evaporating immediately.  The atmosphere couldn't have lasted long, leaking away as it must have done in the low gravity, but perhaps the leakage was less with heavy gases... I leave it to the more scientifically-minded to comment on that.

Anyhow, all this is an invitation to any writer who feels so inclined, to dust off Urey's temporary reasons for the watery-maria theory, and use them as a veneer of credibility for a really haunting tale of the ancient inhabited Moon.

2020 January 18th:   

1956 - THE LAST HOPE FOR OLD MARS?

The history of opinion fascinates me, and I came across a poignant 1950s gem today while browsing among my old astronautics books.  One of them has a chapter called "Fruitful Mars", in which the author admits that Lowell's ideas have not won wide acceptance, yet believes that the question of a civilized Mars is still open:

2020 January 9th:   

THE FLATOSS

Edwin A Abbott's Flatland (1884) is a memoir of life in a two-dimensional universe; its geography, history and society are described and narrated by a luckless Square who gets into big trouble for his "heretical" talk of a world with three dimensions.

The ways in which it's all worked out are fascinating and provoking of much argument.  Abbott decided that Flatland must have one three-dimensional aspect, namely a light source which illuminates the plane surface from above.  Apart from that, everything is two-dimensional, including the rain which intermittently comes from the North.  North and South refer to the alignment of an attractive force, reminiscent of magnetism; the opposite, in some respects, of the "hard direction" on the neutronium world in R L Forward's Dragon's Egg.

The Flatlanders are severely class-conscious. 

...The birth of a true Equilateral Triangle from Isosceles parents is the subject of rejoicing in our country for many furlongs round.  After a strict examination conducted by the Sanitary and Social Board, the infant, if certified as Regular, is with solemn ceremonial admitted into the class of Equilaterals.  He is then immediately taken from his proud yet sorrowing parents and adopted by some childless Equilateral, who is bound by oath never to permit the child henceforth to enter his former home or so much as to look upon his relations again, for fear lest the freshly developed organism may, by force of unconscious imitation, fall back again into his hereditary level...

Recently re-reading this short and delightful classic I began to think of it as an instance of Earthshimmer, a term I coined some while back to denote the way our unusual world is apt to emanate variant literary versions of itself in other modes of existence.  Being a fan of this sort of thing, I explore its possibilities in my own work, as in the unidirectional gravity of Kroth and the air-bubble-set-in-universal-rock scenario of Man of the World, but up till now my only excuse for including such scenarios on an Old Solar System website was to posit a Terran exceptionalism - that's to say, just as (for example) Jupiter has its Great Red Spot and Mars its canals, so does Earth have its Earthshimmer, which just happens to be a peculiarity of our planet.

But now I wonder, with regard to Flatland - could you extend the "shimmer", could you have a Flat OSS too?

There'd be radical changes needed, of course.  In particular, it's not easy to imagine flat worlds orbiting a flat Sun.  But perhaps orbits can be dispensed with.   Perhaps all you'd need, in order to develop the characters of worlds in isolation from one another, is static distance, without orbital motion.  And such distance need not be of the empty kind, but rather an immense desert, perhaps consisting of a smooth, frictionless glassy plain across which the equivalent of rockets could be launched.

The first trip to Flat-Mars from Flat-Earth would thus require an epic voyage across this smooth space.  And when the explorers reached their destination, they could encounter some echoes of the Marsness of our OSS Mars, translated into 2D terms... 

As to what the characteristics of that setting would be, nothing occurs to me right now, but I dare say it could be done.