Stretching the OSS

by Dylan
(Chicago, Illinois, USA)

I vote that if a story shows OSS influence in any way, you ought to allow yourself to include it on the site. That's the rule I've followed, pointing out things I notice with OSS flavors to them. Things like the video games Destiny and No Man's Sky, for example (although Destiny is very, very strongly OSS flavored). I've also mentioned the book "Doomstar" for standing pretty squarely in the OSS shadow.

I have a question myself, incidentally. Imagine a far future where humanity has taken terraforming as far as we can. The inner planets are all habitable or have habitable regions, and the gas giants have been turned into protostars to support systems of liveable moons. If you made the planets reflect their OSS counterparts, would it still count as OSS, or would it perhaps have too much ordinary science fiction to count anymore? For example, if the terraforming were slowly degrading on Mars, or Venus were tropical and jungled, or Mercury had "habitable zones" around the poles, would that be enough to make it OSS in spirit?

{reply from Zendexor: the far future you mention would be in some sense a descendant of the OSS. Partly this is because the OSS has in any case some connection with practical reality - Venus could be made tropical, whereas Pluto couldn't. But also you and I might guess that the planetary engineering efforts were influenced by preconceived ideas descended in a long line from ancient OSS dreams. And even that this influence itself might be a reflection of some destined reality. "Life imitating art" might actually be a long-term principle of the universe.}

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Solar System Heritage