Vast Distances of the Old Solar System

by Dylan Jeninga
(Chicago, Illinois, USA)

I was reading your Dec. 5 diary, Zendexor, and I confess that I wish the long voyage to nearby planets had been a more persistant trope!

"Space is hard!" I don't remember who said that, but I've heard it called NASA's unofficial slogan. A better slogan might be "Per Aspera Ad Astra", "through difficulty, to the stars." While I love a space opera or western (in fact, I'd like to write one sometime), nothing preserves the alien nature of the solar system like distance. And by distance, I mean time.

I've actually been thinking about this particular subject. I recently aquired a game called "Kerbal Space Program", which has you heading up the space program for a planet of adorable little green men called Kerbals. Despite the comedic value of the Kerbalnauts, I understand the rocketry is fairly realistic, and I was introduced to the game by an engineer friend of mine.

Anyways, I sent my Kerbalnauts to colonize their Solar System's Venusian standin, a planet called Eve. It's the nearest planet to Kerbal-Earth, but nonetheless it took two years (from the passenger's perspective) for my colony ship to move its 800 Kerbals into Eve's gravity well. It occurred to me that even though Eve was relatively close to Kerbal-Earth, my Kerbalnauts were as isolated as if they had traveled to a distant star. The physical miles didn't matter, it was the time it took to get there that gave the feeling of distance.

The OSS did it best, of course. No Man Friday and Voyage to Sfanomoe both communicate interplanetary distance well, to add to your list. The Rolling Stones (also known as Space Family Stone) and Between Planets are two Heinlein works that feature long excursions with lots of downtime. In Stirling's Lords of Creation books, the difficulty of reaching Mars or Venus is part of the setup: only the best are sent and they are trained to make almost everything themselves, since it will be a long time before a supply ship can reach them. I'm sure there are dozens of other examples, we could probably compile quite a list!

NSS fiction, which appears to be having something of a mini renaissance over interstellar fiction, seems to have a decent respect for distance as well. A major mechanism of Andy Weir's The Martian is the enormous amount of time that must elapse before rescue or resupply can reach Astronaut Mark Watney. James A Corey's Expanse series is set in a colonized Solar System wherein ice haulers make years-long treks between Saturn and Ceres. In that one in particular, the plot gets going when a particular ice hauler picks up a distress signal from another ship a million clicks away, and they must answer it because they are the closest ship by far!

I hope this trend continues. Aside from making space seem "hard", it helps to preserve the individuality of the planets by keeping them from being too neighborly. Planet-hopping, as you said, is a good thing in many stories, but only as long as it does not drown out the stories with more respect for distance.

{Z: All this reminds me that in some of Lovecraft's writing - possible "A Whisperer in Darkness" among others - there are creatures who traverse space "on their vast membranous wings". That must make for slow travel! Presumably they tack against the solar wind.}

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Dec 12, 2016
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vast distances vs. half-vast diagrams
by: John Michael Greer

Zendexor, I agree wholeheartedly about the diagrams. Even when I was a kid I didn't like the kind that had the planets cheek by jowl; I was one of those geeky kids that built a reflector telescope (full disclosure -- I bought the main mirror, rather than grinding it myself) and stared up at the landscapes of the Moon and the rings of Saturn on such clear nights as Seattle provided, and that gave me some sense of just how much space there was in the solar system. At the time, I thought that was seriously cool. Now? I still think it's seriously cool.

With regard to Lovecraftian space travel, oh, granted -- the guy could crank out the GAWIons. Still, my favorite spacefaring Lovecraftian race was wingless; those were the flying polyps from "The Shadow out of Time," the mysterious beings whose windowless basalt towers and power over the winds made the Great Race of Yith turn whatever color conical rugose alien entities turn with fright. As I recall, the polyps ruled over Earth and two other planets in our solar system before the Great Race of Yith conquered the surface of Earth.

Hmm...that implies that in the Triassic solar system, the flying polyps still might have had colonies on Mars and Venus, or Mars and Ganymede, or -- why not? -- Mars and Minerva, the asteroid progenitor planet. Some serious space opera could be written about that, perhaps with a human space ship and crew being caught in a temporal discontinuity and flung back in time...

{Z: Moreover, the rugose cones must have had quite a career before their minds were displaced by the interstellar mind-swappers from Yith. Physically, I suppose, the cones evolved on Earth, or so I understand, and so they count as a native Terran civilization, at any rate for as long as they were allowed to keep their own mentalities.

(If I've made any historical errors here, please correct me: you're more the Lovecraft expert!)

The problem with envisaging sequels to HPL's work is that it's no good unless you can recapture the tone of brooding infinity - and it's not easy to imagine how to do that within the action-packed structure of a space-opera. But come to think of it, perhaps that's just precisely what you are aiming to do. A challenge worth undertaking; if successful, you'll hit a literary jackpot!}

Dec 11, 2016
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Membranous wings
by: John Michael Greer

Zendexor, yep -- the Mi-Go in "The Whisperer in Darkness," the crinoid things of Antarctica in "At the Mountains of Madness," and Cthulhu and his minions in "The Call of Cthulhu" all come fluttering down from the stars on wings. I admit that always had me scratching my head, since wings large enough to enable solar sailing would be a little unmanageable here on Earth! That said, though Lovecraft could do very capable science fiction when he put his mind to it, astronautics really wasn't Lovecraft's strong suit.

{Z: You can say that again. And yet, HPL gets under our intellectual radar with the sheer cheek of his concepts; flying through space on wings ought to sound childish, but because of the power of his general outlook, one is inclined to revise the laws of logic in his favour... a rapid staccato burst of excuses and hey presto, one accepts the space-wings - because he says so! That's my attitude - suspension of incredulity. And let's face it, these monsters would lose some of our respect if they had to travel around in spaceships like we lesser folk would have to do.}

Dec 11, 2016
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(Very) Deep Heaven
by: John Michael Greer

Dylan, you could as well have titled this "Vast Distances of the *Real* Solar System," of course -- and that's exactly the point. The solar system really is huge, a point that seems to have gotten misplaced once interstellar travel became the standard trope in SF.

I've just pulled down from its shelf a little booklet that came with the Pilgrim Observer kit I mentioned in an earlier post here. It details the supposed Pilgrim I mission, which began (perhaps in an alternate timeline) on March 21, 1979, with the launch of the first Pilgrim spacecraft. (A nice touch: the Pilgrim was to be launched unmanned, and its ten-person crew would go up two days later in the space shuttle Willy Ley.) Once the shakedown phase was over, the Pilgrim I was going to head for Mars on the first leg of a 710-day voyage, doing flybys and brief orbits of Mars and Venus before heading back to Earth.

710 days. That's comparable to the great voyages of discovery in the Age of Sail, and while there would be radio contact with Earth, that's a mighty frail lifeline when there's more than a hundred million miles of hard vacuum between your frail spacecraft and any other human beings. What splendid stories could be told about such voyages!

{Z: Awareness of the Solar System's hugeness isn't helped by well-meaning diagrams in which big fat planets occupy most of the page, showing them in their relative sizes or their order from the sun, but not showing the space between them to scale - which would require unrealistically large sheets of paper!}

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