what to see on
jupiter

For a scenic browse, and an answer-page for Guess The World...

new outlook on jupiter

"...Maybe the brains of Earth things naturally are slow and foggy.  Maybe we are the morons of the universe.  Maybe we are fixed so we have to do things the hard way."

And, in the new sharp clarity of thought that seemed to grip him, he knew that it would not only be the matter of colours in a waterfall...  He sensed other things, things not yet quite clear.  A vague whispering that hinted of greater things, of mysteries beyond the pale of human thought, beyond even the pale of human imagination.  Mysteries, fact, logic built on reasoning.  Things that any brain should know if it used all its reasoning power.

"We're still mostly Earth," he said.  "We're just beginning to learn a few of the things we are to know - a few of the things that were kept from us as human beings, perhaps because we were human beings.  Because our human bodies were poor bodies.  Poorly equipped for thinking, poorly equipped in certain senses that one has to have to know.  Perhaps even lacking in certain senses that are necessary to true knowledge."

He stared back at the dome, a tiny black thing dwarfed by the distance.

Back there were men who couldn't see the beauty...  Men who thought that swirling clouds and lashing rain obscured the planet's face.  Unseeing human eyes.  Poor eyes.  Eyes that could not see the beauty in the clouds, that could not see through the storm.  Bodies that could not feel the thrill of trilling music stemming from the rush of broken water...

Clifford D Simak, Desertion (Astounding, November 1944)

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battle on jupiter

...No possible artificial structure, and but few natural ones - in practice manoeuvres entire mountains had been lifted and hurled for miles through the air - could have withstood the incredible violence of that lunging, twisting, upheaving impact.  Lifted bodily by that impalpable hawser of force and cruelly wrenched and twisted by its enormous couple of angular momentum... boulders, fragments of concrete masonry, and masses of metal flew in all directions as that city-encircling conduit of diabolical machinery was torn from its bed.

A portion of that conduit fully thirty miles in length was in the air, a twisted, flaming inferno of wrecked generators, exploding ammunition, and broken and short-circuited high-tension leads...  With resounding crashes the structure parted at the weakened points, the furious upheaval stopped, and, the tractor beams shut off, the shattered, smoking, erupting mass of wreckage fell in clashing, grinding ruin upon the city...

The material lining of the ghastly moat was the only substance capable of resisting the action of its contents, and now, that lining destroyed by the uprooting of the fortress, that corrosive, brilliantly mobile liquid cascaded down into the trough and added its hellish contribution to the furious scene.  For whatever that devouring fluid touched flared into yellow flame, gave off clouds of lurid, strangling vapour, and disappeared...

E E "Doc" Smith, Spacehounds of IPC (1931, 1947)

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heavy weather on jupiter

...The wind came whooping out of eastern darkness, driving a lash of ammonia dust before it...

He clawed all four feet into the broken shards which were soil, hunched down and groped for his little smelter.  The wind was an idiot bassoon in his skull.  Something whipped across his back, drawing blood, a tree yanked up by the roots and spat a hundred miles.  Lightning cracked, immensely far overhead where clouds boiled with night. 

As if to reply, thunder toned in the ice mountains and a red gout of flame jumped and a hillside came booming down, spilling itself across the valley...

The fire and the lightning gave him enough illumination to find his apparatus.  He picked up tools in muscular hands, his tail gripped the trough and he battered his way to the tunnel and thus to his dugout.

It had walls and roof of water, frozen by sun-remoteness and compressed by tons of atmosphere jammed on to every square inch.  Ventilated by a tiny smoke hole, a lamp of tree oil burning in hydrogen made a dull light for the single room...

Poul Anderson, Call Me Joe (Astounding Science Fiction, April 1957)

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a metropolis on jupiter

...The sphere was borne up a canal through the center of the village.  Connor looked with dumbfounded eyes upon the thousands of huts which lay on either side.  Waterways intersected at regular well-placed intervals, aqueous streets crowded with dwelling-places of the tetrahedron creatures.  It was a gigantic metropolis of unaccountable intelligent beings.  In the near distance, the crimson beam shot up into the sky, a pillar of light and an object of insatiable curiosity for the terrestrials.

At last, a great structure, centering the tetrahedron metropolis, loomed huge and rough, a black craggy mass approached by a waterway leading into an arching tunnel.  The sphere was pushed and jostled beneath this arch and through various branches of the waterway beneath the great building.  A vague diffused light danced on the walls of the cavernous dwelling...

Suddenly, they found themselves being propelled down a long canal leading across a great chamber which resembled an amphitheatre, already rapidly filling with the tetrahedrons.  On a central dais, surrounded by waterlanes, was a group of imposing creatures with gigantic swollen heads twice the size of those propelling the sphere...

J Harvey Haggard, Children of the Ray (Fantastic Story Quarterly, Spring 1950)

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a jovian bay with saurians in the shallows

...Four days later, after crossing a ridge of mountains that the pressure on the aneroid barometer showed to be about thirty-two thousand feet high, and a stretch of flat country a few miles in width, they came to a great arm of the sea.  It was about thirty miles wide at its mouth, which was narrowed like the neck of a bottle, and farther inland was over one hundred miles across, and though their glasses, the clear air, and the planet's size enabled them to see nearly five hundred miles, they could not find its end.  In the shallow water along its shores, and on the islands rising but a few feet above the waves, they saw all kinds of amphibians and sea-monsters.  Many of these were almost the exact reproduction in life of the giant plesiosaurs, dinosaurs, and elasmosaurs, whose remains are preserved in the museums on earth.  The reptilian bodies of the elasmosaurs, seventy-five feet in length, with the forked tongues, distended jaws and fangs of a snake, were easily taken for the often described but probably mythical sea-serpent, as partially coiled they occasionally raised their heads twelve or fifteen feet...

Notwithstanding the striking similarity of these creatures to their terrestrial counterparts that existed on earth during its corresponding period, there were some interesting modifications.  The organs of locomotion in the amphibians were more developed, while the eyes of all were larger, the former being of course necessitated by the power of gravity, and the latter by the greater distance from the sun...

John Jacob Astor, A Journey in Other Worlds (1894)

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jovian ground-dweller among sky-folk

...he was on his way down.  To and fro he swung, hearing the wind whistle past him.  A hunter tossed him a rope.  He caught hold.  The Hidden Folk lined themselves along the far end and started off.

The great nest was soon lost to view.  It was not surprising that no ground dweller had ever seen one like that, or an aerial pasture, or the monsters which browsed there.  A mile up, with half the atmosphere and a goodly percentage of the clouds between, they would be invisible.  He wondered what other strangenesses dwelt in his heaven.

After a while he felt the strain increase on his tow rope, until at last he could hold it no more and must knot it about his waist.  The hunters were plainly laboring hard.  He needed a few minutes to deduce the reason.  Nature had meant the leaf which supported him to float at a certain altitude.  He was now down to where the air was getting appreciably denser.  His gills recognized that...

Poul Anderson, Three Worlds to Conquer (1964)

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violent jovian seas

...How long I was in crossing that dismal ocean, I do not know...  with no sun, moon, nor stars, I could not measure time.

I saw no ship upon that entire vast expanse of water, but I did see life - plenty of it.  And I saw terrific storms that buffeted my craft, tossing it about like a feather.  But that was nothing compared with that I saw below me as the storms at the height of their fury lashed the surface of the waters.  I realized then how suicidal would have been my attempt to cross that terrible ocean in the frail craft I had planned to build.  I saw waves that must have measured two hundred feet from trough to crest - waves that hurled the mighty monsters of the deep as though they had been tiny minnows.  No ship could have lived in such seas...

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Skeleton Men of Jupiter (Amazing Stories, February 1943)

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the singing plants of jupiter

...While in quest of fire-wood, they came upon great heaps of bones, mostly those of birds, and were attracted by the tall, bell-shaped flowers growing luxuriantly in their midst.  These exhaled a most delicious perfume, and at the centre of each flower was a viscous liquid, the colour of honey.

"If this tastes as well as it looks," said Bearwarden, "it will come in well for dessert"; saying which he thrust his finger into the recesses of the flower, intending to taste the essence.  Quietly, but like a flash, the flower closed, his hand being nearly caught and badly scratched by the long, sharp thorns that now appeared at the edges...

...Towards evening these flowers sent up their most beautiful song, to hear which flocks of birds came from far and near, alighting on the trees, and many were lured to death by the siren strains and the honey...

John Jacob Astor, A Journey in Other Worlds (1894)

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approaching a vast presence on jupiter

My route now carried me smoothly towards the incandescent area...  I approached the iridescent region and then was suddenly inside it.  The sensation was of being inside a glorious world of light and colour, and with this sensation came the certainty that someone was talking to me.  Although I was not conscious of hearing any known words, I knew that I could remove my headpiece.  I moved on closer, gliding through the sea of shimmering light.  Voices spoke at me now from every side.  It wasn't like ordinary speech.  It was more like the voices of music.  I felt I knew something both beautiful and profound was being said, but that I lacked a knowledge of the language.  The sounds became louder as I proceded.

There were shapes too, showing more clearly the forming and reforming process I'd seen from the outside.

The voices drew me on even further, and the further I travelled the clearer the shapes became and the more distinctive the sounds.  The language seemed not only accessible but immediately within my grasp.  Suddenly I knew the language would indeed become clear - but only if I were to proceed beyond the threshold of my own being...

Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle, The Incandescent Ones (1977)

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flying low over a moonlit jovian ocean

Beneath them lay a vast, heaving sea, bathed in silvery light by the three moons now in the sky.  It was one of the thirty tremendous oceans of the monarch planet, an endless watery plain whose moonlit surface heaved in great billows toward the sky.

Curt had leveled off, and now the Comet screamed eastward low above the tossing silver ocean.  Under the brilliant rays of Ganymede and Europa and Io, the waste of waters stretched to the far horizons in magnificent splendor.

Moon-bats, those weird Jovian birds that for some mysterious reason never fly except when the moons shine, were circling high above the waters.  Their broad wings shone in the silver light with uncanny iridescence, due to some strange photochemical effect.

Schools of flame-fish, small fish that glowed with light because of their habit of feeding on radioactive sea-salts, swam just under the surface.  The triple head of hydra, a species of big sea-snake always found twined in curious partnerships of three, reared above the waves.  Far northward a "stunner", like an enormous flat white disc of flesh, shot up out of the moonlit sea and came down with a thunderous shock that would stun all fish immediately and make them easy prey.

The Comet drove on low above the silver-lit ocean teeming with strange life.  Under the three big, bright moons, the tear-drop ship cleaved the atmosphere like a meteor, hurrying toward the perilous rendezvous with mystery that Curt Newton was determined to keep.

"Lights ahead, master," boomed Grag, the robot's photoelectric eyes peered keenly...

Edmond Hamilton, Captain Future and the Space Emperor (1939)

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perils in the fern-forests of jupiter

…The heavy wet air worked havoc with the Earthmen's lungs and the so-called Jovian croup became soon as well-known and much more feared than Martian fever.  Men toiling in the thin sunlight were stricken by it.  Crane's forces were decimated by it.  The fern forests, too, held weird forms of life that proved a problem, some of them disk-shaped things of flesh that enveloped anything living in their bodies and ingested it directly.  There were also strange huge worm-like things existing in the oozy soil, and others stranger still.  Crane's men had to work with atom-blasts constantly ready to repel these strange predatory forms of life.

Out of the fern forests, too, came to watch the Earthmen hosts of the big, soft-bodied creatures Gillen had called the Jovians.  These had bodies eight feet high and six feet around, like big cylinders of hairless brown flesh supported on thick flipper-like limbs, with similar flipper-like arms.  Their small round heads had dark mild eyes and mouths from which came their deep bass speech.  Crane found they were perhaps as intelligent as the Martians but were rather more peaceful, their only weapons spears with which they fought off the things in the fern forests that attacked them.

They were quite friendly toward the Earthmen and watched their operations with child-like interest...

...Then came the trouble.  It began as on Mars – a bad-tempered Earthman at one of the forts beat a flipper-man for some reason and in a brawl that ensued one Earthman and five Jovians were killed.  Word must have spread somehow in the fern forests for the Jovians retired from the forts of the earthmen.  Jimmy Crane cursed in private but acted, punishing the Earthmen concerned and sending Halkett to the Jovian communities to patch up matters.

Halkett had learned the Jovian language and proved a good ambassador for he was sympathetic with the flipper-men.  He did his best to fulfil his mission but could not succeed.  The flipper-men told Halkett that they had no hard feelings but would prefer to avoid the Earthmen lest further trouble develop…

Edmond Hamilton, A Conquest of Two Worlds (Wonder Stories, February 1932)

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toiling to set up a base on jupiter

…He seemed to stride out into a hellish chaos of sound and light and mist.  The mind-shattering explosions of thunder from far up in the cloud-envelope were accompanied by ghastly flares and rivers of lightning that each time illuminated the misty scene about him…

…Drop One was all here, and now began the toiling, urgent work of unloading equipment and setting up the prefab metal Command Hut, hospital, and supply-dumps for the bigger expedition to come.  Already metal crates were being swung out of the hatches of their own rocket, and the men in their Walkers were striding clumsily to the task.

Nightmare scene, to Baird’s eyes!  The swirling mists, heavy with fumes from the vulcanism eastward.  The rockets looming spectral in it, the unhuman shapes of the Walkers stiffly moving about, the men in them showing pale, drawn faces through their faceplates.  And above all the thunder, the volleying of titan explosions in the sea of atmosphere above them, the flash of dancing lightning up there that never ceased….

Edmond Hamilton, Thunder World (Imaginative Tales, July 1956)

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jupiter's violent fiery surface

…It lay, as nearly as they could judge, some two thousand miles beneath them, a distance which the telescopes reduced to less than twenty; and they saw for a few moments the world that was in the making.  Through floating seas of misty steam they beheld what seemed to them to be vast continents shape themselves and melt away into oceans of flames.  Whole mountain ranges of glowing lava were hurled up miles high to take shape for an instant and then fall away again, leaving fathomless gulfs of fiery mist in their place.

Then waves of molten matter rose up again out of the gulfs, tens of miles high and hundreds of miles long, surged forward, and met with a concussion like that of millions of earthly thunder-clouds.  Minute after minute they remained writhing and struggling with each other, flinging up spurts of flaming matter far above their crests.  Other waves followed them, climbing up their bases as a sea-surge runs up the side of a smooth, slanting rock.  Then from the midst of them a jet of living fire leapt up hundreds of miles into the lurid atmosphere above, and then, with a crash and a roar which shook the vast Jovian firmament, the battling lava-waves would split apart and sink down into the all-surrounding fire-ocean, like two grappling giants who had strangled each other in their final struggle.

George Griffith, A Honeymoon in Space (1901)

>>  Guess The World - Third Series

anomalous low-gravity area on jupiter

For over an hour the ship had been propelled swiftly, irresistibly toward the center of the red spot. It had been up about forty thousand feet. Now, with a jerk that sent both men reeling, it had been drawn down to within fifteen thousand feet of the surface; and the sight that was now becoming more and more visible was incredible.

Beneath was a vast, orderly checkerboard. Every alternate square was covered by what seemed a jointless metal plate. The open squares, plainly land under cultivation, were surrounded by gleaming fences that hooked each metal square with every other one of its kind as batteries are wired in series. Over these open squares progressed tiny, two legged figures, for the most part following gigantic shapeless animals like figures out of a dream. Ahead suddenly appeared the spires and towers of an enormous city!

Metropolis and cultivated land! It was as unbelievable, on that raw new planet, as such a sight would have been could a traveler in time have observed it in the midst of a dim Pleistocene panorama of young Earth.

It was instantly apparent that the city was their destination. Rapidly the little ship was rushed toward it; and, realizing at last the futility of its laboring, Brand cut off the atomic motor and let the shell drift.

Over a group of squat square buildings their ship passed, decreasing speed and drifting lower with every moment. The lofty structures that were the nucleus of the strange city loomed closer. Now they were soaring slowly down a wide thoroughfare; and now, at last, they hovered above a great open square that was thronged with figures.

Lower they dropped. Lower. And then they settled with a slight jar on a surface made of reddish metal; and the figures rushed to surround them.

________

Looking out the glass panel at these figures, both Brand and Dex exclaimed aloud and covered their eyes for a moment to shut out the hideous sight of them. Now they examined them closely.

Manlike they were: and yet like no human being conceivable to an Earth mind. They were tremendously tall—twelve feet at least—but as thin as so many animated poles. Their two legs were scarce four inches through, taper-less, boneless, like lengths of pipe; and like two flexible pipes they were joined to a slightly larger pipe of a torso that could not have been more than a foot in diameter. There were four arms, a pair on each side of the cylindrical body, that weaved feebly about like lengths of rubber hose.

Set directly on the pipe-like body, as a pumpkin might be balanced on a pole, was a perfectly round cranium in which were glassy, staring eyes, with dull pupils like those of a sick dog. The nose was but a tab of flesh. The mouth was a minute, circular thing, soft and flabby looking, which opened and shut regularly with the creature's breathing. It resembled the snout-like mouth of a fish, of the sucker variety; and fish-like, too, was the smooth and slimy skin that covered the beanpole body.

Paul Ernst, The Red Hell of Jupiter (Astounding Stories, October 1931)

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prison pit on jupiter

Furtively Alan Sarett peered through the heavy murk of the Jovian prison pit. A cloud of yellow stream writhed upward from the boiling spring at his feet, obscuring everything with choking sulphurous veil. He caught a hazy glimpse of Jon Cory, lank, and raw-bones, stripped to the waist, toiling steadily on the opposite bank of the pool. Then a shrill, peremptory note came from the throat of the Jovian guard and a wire-thin tentacle lashed viciously across his naked back, cutting deep. Alan's face wrinkled like the snout of a snarling dog; and he bent over the bubbling spring, tearing savagely with a long, claw-tipped instrument at the crust of sulphur forming continuously on the hip of the caldron. A heap of the lemon yellow fragments lay behind him.

Through slitted lids he glared up at the mighty figure of the Jovian, hatred burning in his eyes. Damned sluur – he'd pay for that – and soon! They'd planned everything – he and Cory and Parker, and the Uranian, Tull – and before many minutes passed, they'd hear the signal. … The signal, the roar of the supply ship from Io – and this sluur would boil in the sulphur pool, and they'd be heading for freedom! Freedom – and Max Brodeur!

His ears strained for the first sound of the supply ship's rockets, a tenseness creeping through him. And even as he labored, he watched the yellow-skinned guard, to be ready when the signal came. Formidable antagonists, these giant brutes with their tremendous muscles. It was no joke for two Terrestrials – or even a half dozen – to attack one of them. Ten feet above the obsidian surface of the Pit this sluur towered, his great bulbous body supported by three mighty, multi-joined limbs terminating in immense sucker-discs. His head, if it could be called a head, was merely an elongation of his body; and the bare expanse of flesh was broken only by a single huge eye, faceted like insect's, and an enormous, toothless mouth. From the top of his head projected six long, wiry tentacles – and with these that Alan feared most. For in them lay the strength of spring steel.

Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, Mutineers of Space (Dynamic Science Stories, February 1939)

>>  Guess The World - Third Series

arrival at a domed city on jupiter

When Colbie, after his twelve-hour trek along the ammonia river which ran from the lake into which the Fountain poured its noxious ammonia liquids, finally reached Jupiter City, he was in a state of fatigue under which his muscles, every one of them, seemed to scream out a protest.  He pressed the buzzer that let those within the air-lock understand that he was demanding admittance, and was decidedly relieved to see the huge valve swing open, throwing a glow of luminescence on the wildly swirling gases that raced across the surface of that mighty, poisonous planet Jupiter.  Two men came forward.  They covered him with hand weapons, and urged him inside the lock.  The keeper of the lock desired to know Colbie’s business, and Colbie demanded that he be taken before the commander of the garrison – who was also mayor of the city – as things had, of necessity, to be run on a military basis.

Riding through the streets of the city, he was both thrilled and awed after that tortuous ordeal in the wilds of Jupiter, by the consciousness of the great genius of the human race – that it was able, in the face of so many killing difficulties, to erect this domed city, so well equipped with the luxuries of Earthly life…

Ross Rocklynne, The Men and the Mirror (Astounding, July 1938)

>>  Guess The World - Third Series

ancient ruins amid a fern forest on jupiter

…Curt Newton entered the truck with the others and they rattled through the bumpy streets of Jungletown.  They followed the other trucks northward along a rude Jovian roadway through the jungle.

The great fern-forest was a towering, solid wall on either side of them.  Sucker-flies swarmed out of the green vegetation upon them.  They glimpsed grotesque tree-octopi flitting through the ferns, and bulbous balloon-beasts floated by above them.

“What’s that place over there?” asked Ron King, pointing in awe at distant, cyclopean black towers that rose out of the jungle.

Captain Future knew what it was.  In that Place of the Dead, as the Jovians called it, he had once reached the climax of one of his most perilous adventures.  But he pretended ignorance, as Joan Randall answered the question.

“It’s an ancient, ruined Jovian city,” Joan said, her brown eyes fixed on those crumbling, enigmatic towers…

Edmond Hamilton, Magic Moon (Captain Future, Winter 1944)

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browsers on the floating hills of jupiter

…The things moving up and down those waxen slopes were still too far away for Falcon to make out many details, and they must have been very large to be visible at all at such a distance.  Almost black, and shaped like arrowheads, they maneuvered by slow undulations of their entire bodies, so that they looked rather like giant manta rays, swimming above some tropical reef.

Perhaps they were sky-borne cattle, browsing on the cloud pastures of Jupiter, for they seemed to be feeding along the dark, red-brown streaks that ran like dried-up river beds down the flanks of the floating cliffs.  Occasionally, one of them would dive headlong into the mountain of foam and disappear completely from sight.

Kon-Tiki was moving only slowly with respect to the cloud layer below; it would be at least three hours before she was above those ephemeral hills.  She was in a race with the Sun.  Falcon hoped that darkness would not fall before he could get a good view of the mantas, as he had christened them, as well as the fragile landscape over which they flapped their way…

Arthur C Clarke, A Meeting With Medusa (Playboy, December 1971)

>>  Guess The World - Fourth Series

jupiter's vegetable great red spot

…I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and spacemen, and headed in.  The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean.

That famous Red Spot was that big, too.  It kept expanding until the whole universe was a fierce, raw luminous red.  Out beyond it at first there had been fringes of snow-white frozen ammonia, but now it was all dyed redder than Mars.  Then I took the plunge right into it.  Surprise!  The stuff was plants!  Plants as big as meadows, bright red, floating around in those clouds of frozen ammonia like seaweed!  Then I noticed that the ammonia around them wasn’t frozen any more and peeked at the outside thermometer.  I couldn’t believe it.  It was above zero.  Then I forgot about the temperature because it dawned on me that I was lost.  I couldn’t see a thing but drifting ammonia fog and those tangles of red floating plants like little islands all around.  Cutting down the motor, I eased along.

But my green boat must have showed up like a lighthouse in all that red, because it wasn’t long until I spotted a purple and green hopper-scorp traveling straight toward me, sort of rowing along with a pair of stubby wings.  He didn’t seem to be making much effort, even though he was climbing vertically up from the planet…

A L Haley, Jupiter's Joke (Planet Stories, Fall 1954)

>>  Guess The World - Fourth Series

toughing it out on jupiter

…We woke up this morning feeling as though we had slept under a pile of rocks. The gravity, frankly, is horrible. Even arising from the floor was an effort. We had to turn on our stomachs, slowly push ourselves to hands and knees, and stagger erect while holding on to the wall hand-rails. Then we stood there swaying, while our leg muscles gradually took up the burden of our five hundred pounds of weight.

We felt a little better after eating, and drinking water. Our first job was to figure out where we were. Swinerton climbed to the conning tower and took a look around. He couldn’t see very far in the thick, cloudy mist.

It is distinctly a reddish mist, as of course this is the Great Red Spot area. It is never still. It whips back and forth tempestuously, often shaking the ship. Our gauge showed that the atmospheric pressure was ninety pounds to the square inch. We suspect the vapors are very nearly fluid, from pressure alone, down here at the surface.

The lighting is very peculiar down here. Above are six thousand miles of heavy vapor, including krypton, methane, ammonia, bromine hydride, heavy hydrogen, and polymerized nitrogen. If there’s oxygen, it can only be in some combined form, as nitrous oxide.

Sunlight barely worms through this gas-porridge, as a ghastly pale glow. None of the moons can be seen through the pall. We feel as though we’re at the bottom of a gaseous ocean, in a submarine.

Swinerton suddenly yelped.

“Life!” he gasped. “There’s life down here!”

Halloway and I saw it ourselves a moment later, as it flapped past our window. A small winged creature with a hawk’s beak that circled the lifeboat as though in curiosity, then lazily soared away. It seemed almost to float in the dense medium, more like a fish swimming than a bird flying. But just imagine any creature living in this hell-brew air! Swinerton says its metabolism must be utterly alien to anything we can conceive.

Eando Binder, Via Jupiter (Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1942)

>>  Guess The World - Fourth Series

Comment from contributor Lone Wolf:
This is the last one from a series of 10 stories, published in Thrilling Wonder Stories from 1937 to 1942, describing expeditions to different planet of the Solar System with more or less the same characters in the form of radio-reports sent "via etherline", which makes the style a little boring and not very engaging, although the story is interesting. (I lack the 6th story, because the issue from March 1940 is not available, and thus I still don't know how they got out from Venus...) Besides the common characters, they are linked by the theme of the great pyramids, found on all the planets, which turn out to be built by the ancient extinct Martian civilization. These stories were published again, edited in a book form in 1971 under the title Puzzle of the Space Pyramids.

telescopically visible life on jupiter

While he had been speaking another cloud hurricane had swept across the screen, and been succeeded by another narrow rift of calm. Again gazing on the placid waters below, I became aware of some dark object which seemed to move upon their surface. I riveted my eyes upon it, and felt that I could not be mistaken. Here, now, was something to which I could adjust my focus much better than to clouds or calm water, and so I readjusted the receiving lens and likewise the eye-pieces of the binocular. The object gained sharpness and distinctness. It was evidently a living thing of some sort, and I knew it must be of immense size to be visible at a distance of thirty miles. I called out to the major, telling him of my discovery, and asking him to come and look at it.

"No," said he; "since you have been so fortunate as to discover this object, creature, or whatever it is, make the most of the opportunity for observation. I dare not leave this mirror for an instant, or the scene would instantly pass from the field of vision, never to be recovered, I shall take extra pains to regulate the focusing, so that you may have uninterrupted means of observation."

I did not let my eyes leave the object for a moment, and presently the concentration of my gaze, as is frequently the case, rendered my vision clearer. There it was—an animal, toiling, floating, undulating on the surface of the water, if water it was, for it seemed to have rather the consistency of oil, and its smoothness served to impress me more strongly with the idea that the Jovian sea must possess constituents not found in our own oceans. I carefully moved my binocular on its tripod so as to keep the monster thoroughly in the field of vision, and for as long a time as possible. Gradually it resolved itself into a creature most unmistakably of the saurian tribe. The tapering muzzle, the long tail were perfectly defined, and left no room for doubt as to its identity. In place of legs, however, it possessed enormous fins or wings on either side, articulated like those of a bat, which were raised and depressed alternately, and served to propel the monster through the water. It seemed as though I were watching the slow evolutions of a nondescript tadpole in a pool a good many yards off. I followed with intense interest the progress of this monster, which kept slowly plowing its course, with alternate strokes of its side fins, evidently toward some definite point, and I caught myself wondering how long it would be before this living thing, endowed with organs of locomotion adapted to its surrounding circumstances, and possessed of a purpose, would encounter its mate or its prey; and what it would think if it knew that another living being, on a body which (owing to its angular proximity to the sun) it could never see, even were it endowed with human eyes and human intelligence, was watching it attentively more than four hundred millions of miles away, I was abruptly roused from my reverie by the sudden disappearance of the object from the screen, and, taking my eyes from the binocular to ascertain the cause, found that I had unconsciously followed its image as it slowly moved to the border, where, of course, it vanished. I lost no time in returning my binocular to the centre of the field, and though I saw more of the eddying cloud masses and dashing equatorial cyclones, I was not lucky enough to inspect the surface of the Jovian sea through a rift again.

Robert Duncan Milne, A Peep at the Planets (The Argonaut, 27 August 1881)

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Comment from contributor Lone Wolf:
This story is not about interplanetary travel, but observation of the planets through an extremely powerful telescope with revolutionary new design (which is discussed in details and even given a scheme, like in that moon novel of R.H. Romans half a century later), invented by some Major Titus, who shows it to the author. It is second of the series of three stories, written more like reports and published weekly in the San Francisco newspaper "The Argonaut". Although the planets are described only cursorily in accordance with the astronomical notions of that time, it contains a lot of CLUFFs. Thus Saturn and Neptune are said to be frozen worlds with landscape of giant icebergs, but Major Titus claims to have discovered some curious forms of gigantic life on Uranus (which is not observable at that moment and the author never sees it). Mars is seen as an old planet with cyclopean ruins of lost civilizations, where now only plant life remains (this is the "pre-canal" Mars, with seas and continents from the maps of Dawes and Proctor), while Venus is a paradisiacal world, where people have a more harmonious environment and society than those on the Earth. Major Titus also supposes that there may be some giant monstrous life-forms, surviving in underground oceans on the Moon, of which he has caught a glimpse through the hole of the crater Tycho, but they are not described either. And the author manages to see the controversial moon of Venus, which some astronomers from the XIX century (like Cassini and others) claimed to have observed.

Comment from Zendexor:
In sf terms, this is prophetic!  The idea of "remote close-up" examination of other worlds by means of advanced instrumentation on Earth is developed powerfully in Piers Anthony's Macroscope about a century later than the above extract.

sub-sea men on jupiter

"That crazy android!  I might have known he’d pull something like this!  When I get my hands on him – "

Curt was already donning a space-suit.  He screwed its helmet tight, grasped his proton-pistol, and strode into the water.

The head soles of his suit held him on the sea floor as he marched down an oozy slope.  Flame-fish and hydras swam past him in the green deeps.  The space-suit was a perfect diving suit for his purpose.  He strode deeper and deeper until he glimpsed a bright gleam of light ahead.

It came from the Futuremen’s diving bell.  The improvised bell was an upright cylinder of transparent metal, that stood now amid crumbling black ruins which were half covered by ooze.  Curt glimpsed Otho, Grag and Joan clearly inside the bell, which had a makeshift rocket tube for ascending.

The diving bell had been fastened tightly to the ocean’s slippery floor.  Chains attached the the bell’s underside had been securely pegged down.  And around it were circling a dozen fiercely excited sub-sea men, of the race long known to inhabit the depths of Jupiter’s waters.

The scaled, anthropoidal green monsters glimpsed Curt and rushed toward him, leveling their rude spears…

Edmond Hamilton, Outlaws of the Moon (1942)

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Note from Zendexor:  the above extract is taken from the epilogue to the main story, the rest of which is not about Jupiter at all.  The point of this little final episode is just to show how Otho the android can't take it easy even after the gruelling main adventure narrated in the book (it's the one in which Captain Future is framed as an assassin of the President); after vowing to relax, Otho goes immediately looking for more trouble.

unpopular aborigines of jupiter

An idea occurred to Mansonby. “Professor Mella, these peoples of the Hot Lands — the Vulnos: I don’t quite locate them. Where do they come in? They surely cannot be descended from - ”

“No. I understand you, Mr. Mansonby. You are right. They are not from the common father people. They are the inhabitants who were here when the father people came. They were never quite overcome, but were driven north into the Hot Lands, which were unfit for the use of the father people, and they were left there to themselves.”

Mara Mella said these Vulnos, the dread creatures of the Hot Lands, were as much animal as human. They walked erect, were immensely powerful, and covered with hair like gorillas. They possessed a strange, crude language, made up of howls, barks, screams, and wails, and were of frightful aspect. Beasts in the matter of mating, any male took possession of any female he could muster the force to take, and carried her away to his cave or other rude shelter, where he kept her until he tired of her, or some stronger one came and took her away from him. No offspring seemed ever to result from contact with the human females they abducted, marking them as of a separate and distinct genus, and not human at all. Even their blood was of a different chemical composition, as had been learned by examination of those slain in their battles.

Yet they were shrewd enough to see the value of the inventions of the higher races, and had enough intelligence to use to some extent what they could not evolve or make for themselves. This they contrived mostly by compelling their male prisoners to operate them for them. He had been told there were a few instances where they had been known to operate an air or ether vessel themselves, but personally seemed to be skeptical about it. At any rate, they had not enough wit to achieve any advancement for their own race, if indeed they desired any. In short, while possessing a modicum of human mentality, and some human or near-human traits, they were for the most part downright animals — beasts.

MANSONBY reminded the Jovians of the urgency of their mission and was advised to go to the capital to start his campaign against the Vulnos…

Aladra Septama, The Cry from the Ether (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Spring 1929)

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Comment from Zendexor: 

A typical COMOLD disappointment!  I felt like booing when I realized the author had arranged for the real Jovians to be the bad guys.  

Rather illogical bad guys, at that.  Being so different from humans, why should they bother to abduct human females, who one assumes would, to Vulnos, be reciprocally of “frightful aspect”?

On the other hand I'm likely to give two cheers for any effort to explore solid-surface Jupiter.

jovian landscape from fifty miles up

After perhaps half a minute the creamy blankness outside thinned away and through its last wisps Resken beheld the panorama which he had waited out his millennia to see.

No human eyes would have been able to judge its distance or its scale, but Resken’s hard orbs, with their inbuilt equivalent of radar, ascertained that the planet lay spread out fifty miles below him.  He was permitted to gaze his fill – which made good sense, for why not let him see everything since his likelihood of return to his Terran fortress was zero?

Jupiter’s surface, diffusely bathed in its orange glow, undulated with enormous but shallow gradients, mottled with grey-hazed patches which he guessed (setting his gaze to highest magnification) to be jungle.  Five or six locations showed higher topography, with what resembled steeper volcanoes at the summits of lazier cones, as if Earth’s Mount Fuji had been placed atop Mars’ Olympus Mons.  Valleys and swales were streaked with phosphorescent orange rivers (or roads?) which must supply some of the illumination, while the rest of the available light either spilled up from molten vents or filtered down through the clouds, or both.  Resken wondered whether the darkness of night ever came to the surface of this world.  Perhaps some areas knew blackness, but this one might be a sleepless capital district.  “Guess on, guess on,” he encouraged himself; “there’s naught else to do.”

Robert Gibson, Flame Lords of Jupiter (J M Greer and Zendexor, eds., Vintage Worlds 2 (2020))

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approaching an alien base on jupiter

…Causing the arms and legs of his armor to move gently he swam forward through the thick stuff around him.  It seemed to consist of a combination of fluid and slush – liquefied gases, part of which had even congealed.  Yet he knew from his last glance at his thermometer that it was a little warmer down here than at higher levels.  After all it was unreasonable to suppose that a mass as great as Jupiter could have cooled all the way to its center.  In fact its core, heated by radioactive elements, must still be flaming hot.

He wondered again about the grinding drone on a certain radio wavelength, that coincided in point of origin with the mound-shadow as revealed by radar.  The drone was too even to be a signal.  So he concluded once more that it must be just an incidental part of the functioning of some machinery.  Many electrical devices produced radio noise.  So the droning was probably of no importance.

Gradually the darkness lessened ahead, becoming at last a definite glow, which brightened to a great formless wall of bluish light…

Raymond Z Gallun, Passport to Jupiter (Startling Stories, January 1951)

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a cry for help in a jovian jungle

As he half dozed, the detector phones brought in a medley of vaguely familiar noises above the wind’s whine, chief amongst which were the weird, half-human twitterings of the ostriloath — strange birdlike creature crossed vaguely between ostrich and sloth — and the deep bass grunting of the feather-sphere, the porcupine of Jove, rolling everywhere at terrific speed like a heavily flaked cannon ball. Familiar sounds all --- 

THEN, suddenly, Cardew jolted violently upright, wide awake, his heart slamming painfully with the sudden intensity of his effort, his ears still ringing with what had definitely been a human shout of fear!

“Damned delusions !” he breathed quickly, staring round and below at the crazy jungle. “Couldn’t have been ---”

He frowned in bewilderment. A scream from inside a helmet would be carried to the amplifier on the helmet exterior; even the slightest cry from anybody would be instantly enormously amplified by the dense atmosphere. But nobody else could be in such a cockeyed spot, surely - 

Cardew broke off in his quick reflections and stared with amazed eyes through the clear patch between the nearest Fishnet trees. The light of Europa shone down through cloud breaks upon a space-suited figure lying flat on the ground, straggling against the gravity to tug out an oxygen pistol. A little distance away a hideous little-headed sican, violently strong, sheathed in an armor plating of frozen scales, fixed his intended prey with enormous glassy eyes. It was the largest of all Jovian animals, measuring five feet in length and nearly the same in width. Then it began to advance slowly on its six immensely powerful legs.

Almost as quickly as the danger registered in Cardew’s mind, he had dropped violently to the ground and tugged out his own oxygen pistol. With ponderously dragging feet, the ghastly pull of a nightmare’s dragging chains, he tried to run forward — fired his gun as he went.

Immediately a vicious stream of devastating flame spouted through the moonlight, momentarily lighted the mad glade with bluish-yellow fire. The force of the jet struck the sican clean in the center of its body, sent it rearing upward in a sudden paroxysm of searing pain.

Maddened, it twirled round and jumped dangerously near the sprawling, motionless figure. Then, at another vicious cut across its hideous face, it twisted round and travelled at high speed on its enormously strong legs into the jungle fastness.

Thornton Ayre (John Russell Fearn), Penal World (Astounding Stories, October 1937)

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Comment from contributor Lone Wolf:

Although written under a different pseudonym and in a different magazine, this story seems to be set in the same universe as Outlaw of Saturn, in which there is a reference to "the penal world of Jupiter" ("Unlike the penal world of Jupiter, where the vast pressures had crushed out all the oxygen, Saturn still possesses some, in percentage high enough to support life of an Earthly standard."). But still I am not sure if there is always consistency in his descriptions of the different worlds.

Comment from Zendexor:

See the page A Jovian Compromise.

trek through murk with a native on jupiter

Guided by his compass, he started east, toward far-off Sadra. Behind him, plodding steadily and without concern through the blurred dusk of the eternal storm, was Sabakko.

The first half-mile seemed fairly easy to the stout young physique of the Earthman. He crossed the pitted red soil where he and his companions had discovered a rich deposit of radioactive ore—a deposit which would make them all wealthy, if they happened to survive and put in their claim. Thence he led the way into a gloomy gorge.

All the while, the gravity of Jupiter was doing its strength-sapping work upon him. Nor was this all that was burning up his vitality. Ponderous thunder roared overhead, to the accompaniment of dazzling flares of lightning. Both, by their constant, tense monotony, frazzled his nerves and weakened his morale. The wind was not so strong here in the gorge, but out of the dim murk around him, long, spiny tendrils belonging to forms of life that were neither animal nor quite plant, groped toward him hungrily.

Once a tentacle encircled his body, and his adventure would have reached an abortive end then and there, had it not been for Sabakko, who leaped into action with cold fury, tearing the rooted devil apart with horny fingers.

There must have been a vast difference between the attitudes of the man and the Jovian toward their present experiences. Sabakko had returned to his native habitat. Comparatively, at least, his surroundings could have held few terrors for him. In fact, he seemed more than a bit puzzled at his human companion’s weakness...

Raymond Z Gallun, Strange Creature (Science Fiction, August 1939)

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Comment from contributor Lone Wolf:  Although the story is short and without many details, it still describes the typical solid surface Jupiter. It seems that Jupiter indeed has developed a more or less distinguishable "world character" in the SF of that era.

Comment from Zendexor:  Indeed it has; certainly there is considerable overlap between Gallun's version and that of John Russell Fearn - in fact when I started reading it I guess wrongly that it would turn out to be by Fearn, even though the Gallun version is distinctly murkier.

surprisingly salubrious jupiter

Cap Hanson's jaw fell down to his fourth button. A gasp worked its way up out of his lumbar region. "It—it's impossible!" he said. "I—I don't believe it!"

I didn't either. For what we were seeing mirrored on the turret visiplate was something no man in the universe had ever seen before—and lived to tell about it. We were seeing the troposphere, the stratosphere, the surface atmosphere of the massive planet Jupiter at easy visual range. And we were drifting to solid ground so gently that we were in no more danger than a parachutist approaching a field full of sofa cushions!

It didn't even occur to me, then, to notice how far off the scientists had been in attributing fantastic characteristics to unstudied Jupiter. Because its density was so much less than Earth's, they had envisioned it as a gaseous or semi-liquid planet. Which was so much hogwash. It was a normal-sized core surrounded by blankets, thousands of miles deep, of atmosphere. It was lush, luxuriant, green. Steamy with vapors, riotous with vegetable life. Protected by its swaddling clothes, it was the most likely abode of life Man had ever found outside his native Earth!

Nelson S Bond, The Ghost of Lancelot Biggs (Weird Tales, January 1942)

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Comment from contributor Lone Wolf:
One of the many funny stories from the series about the eccentric genius space navigator Lancelot Biggs; unfortunately there aren't many planetary landscapes described in all of them and this is probably one of the most detailed...

Comment from Zendexor:
The reader is left to concoct (as best he can) an explanation of how the Jovian landscape remains so brightly visible underneath the "blankets, thousands of miles deep, of atmosphere".  This therefore is an excellent example of how the OSS sub-genre offers the reader's imagination a self-catering holiday...