the sunport vista:
zendexor's
oss
diary

May 2017

2017 May 31st:   

TILTED LANDSCAPE, PRE-KROTH

You know I make efforts to include Planet Earth as a worthy object of wonder alongside the other worlds explored on this site.  Never take Planet Three for granted!

David I Masson's Mouth of Hell (New Worlds, January 1966) is a remarkable tale in the sub-genre which one might call "geographical horror".  Pre-dating Gibson's vertiginous trilogy by almost half a century, Masson's account explores a terrifyingly huge hole, thirty miles deep, in our Earth's crust.  This is not the same as giving us an entire globe with uni-directional gravity, which the volumes of Kroth allow us to range over (and under).  Still, the two authors' achievements overlap emotionally.  Here's where Masson's narrative begin to arouse that peculiar thrill:

..."Have you noticed the ground?" said Mehhtuum in Kettass's ear some hours later. 

"The slope?  Yes."  And the chief halted the convoy.  It was just as though someone had tilted the world slightly.  They were pointing down a gentle slope, nearly uniform, which spread east and west as far as eye could see.  Behind to north, the same slope.  The change had been too gradual to notice before.  Kettass had the troop deploy into a broad arrow with his vehicle in the lead and centre.

In the next two hours the tilt became more and more pronounced... 

2017 May 30th:   

CLARKE CONTRADICTING HIMSELF

Having been awarded the Kalinga prize for science-popularization, Arthur C Clarke in his acceptance speech in New Delhi on 27th September 1962 made the following remarks:

...It is obvious that science-fiction should be technically accurate, and there is no excuse for erroneous information when the true facts are available.

2017 May 29th:  

WIDE-EYED FORWARD GAZE AT 2012

I've had a kind of unique moment which can only come to an sf fan.

It happened when I was re-reading Arthur C Clarke's Trouble with Time (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July 1960, as "Crime on Mars").

Because of Clarke's gift at inducing the reader to settle in, I was relaxing into the view of his imagined-in-1960 version of Mars, and therefore, just then, I the reader was, in attitude, likewise in 1960.

This sort of thing usually happens.  For instance when I read a Victorian novel, or (to go further back) a Walter Scott novel, I read in the spirit of the reading public of the time the work was published.  It's natural.  But with sf the consequences can be startling...

Clarke's story concerns the attempted theft of a Martian archaeological treasure.  The narrator is waiting at Phobos Spaceport to embark on his homeward ship:

2017 May 28th:  

THE LOW GROWL OF MEANING

Going on as I often do about the characters of worlds, mostly by means of inductive overlap - accumulating evidence from various stories - I thought it time to approach the question from the other end.  Why does the evidence accumulate in this way?

Could there "be something in it"?

Let me suggest that at any rate we might have rooms set aside in our minds or souls for certain archetypes of worlds, or places.  They happened to get attached in literature to certain bodies in the sky, and this is fun for readers, but as to the reality of it, it doesn't depend upon that sort of truth but upon something about the inner needs of our imaginations.

That's why no amount of disillusion about the real nature of our neighbouring worlds will dampen the OSS.

I thought I'd quote from chapter 2 of Valeddom here, because it seems to touch upon the truth I am getting at, not explicitly, but indirectly.

The hero has not yet accepted that his mind has been transplanted to Mercury - he thinks he's dreaming.  But in tackling what to do about dreams, he delves into what can really move us.

2017 May 27th:  

CONVERSATION IN A MARTIAN BAR

The Reporter by Chad Oliver (Fantastic Story Magazine, Fall 1951) is a polished little story with a surprise ending - a kind of story which is open to the criticism that it only gets read once, because, after you've got the point, there's no more need to back to it, than there is to hear a joke told twice.  (Like Russell's Sole Solution or Heinlein's Columbus Was A Dope.)

In my view the criticism need not apply if the tale is pleasantly written, as this one is.  I have no problem with it as a reader.  But as a critic, it does present a huge difficulty.  What can one say about such a tale, without giving away the point?

Chad Oliver draws the character of George Hartley, disappointed reporter, who is fed up with Mars because "nothing ever happens there".  He's envious of his colleagues on Venus, where the natives aren't extinct and where there's plenty of action and opportunities to uncover a good story.  He grumbles about all this to someone who introduces himself as Henry Adams, a fellow reporter.  And then the grumbling shades into yarning...

For although he doesn't believe a word of it, Hartley has heard tell of someone who found some living Martians.  And here the dramatic irony begins.  Hartley relates the tale of "Headline Fogarty", who was supposed to have encountered the surviving Martians somewhere around the planet's North Pole...  and "Adams" listens sympathetically while Hartley comments on how civilized they must have been.

Can you guess?

..."Anyhow, these Martians were so kind and merciful after countless generations of advanced evolution that they simply couldn't bring themselves to dispose of Headline Fogarty, even though he endangered their secret.  What do you think of that?"

"The Martians must have been too fine a people to live on their own planet after the barbaric Earthmen took it over," Henry Adams said.  "Not that we Earthmen aren't the wonders of the Solar System, of course - I read the papers."

"You bet we are, pal, and that's a fact.  Just look at me - George Hartley, end product of millions of years of selective breeding..."

2017 May 26th:   

SAFETY LAST

Not the Harold Lloyd movie of that name, but some thoughts on the difference between the fictional old space program and the somewhat bogged-down reality.

Of course, it's not just safety questions that cause delay - it's the lack of sufficiently attractive destinations.  Who can doubt that we'd have reached Mars by now if it were habitable? 

Still, let's for a moment concentrate on safety as an issue by itself.

Here's one space pioneer - a Martian seeking Earth, not an Earthman seeking Mars - who really "went for broke":

..the blackness of oblivion was closing in.  He struggled valiantly to master himself and to fight through the gathering gloom that was misting his vision...  There was too much at stake...  The craft was wobbling, and it must not wobble.  A trifling adjustment of delicate stabilizers would fix that, if he could only somehow make the adjustment.

A dribble of sticky, oozy fluid welled from a wound in Number 774's side.  His limbs, some of them broken, fumbled awkwardly and inefficiently with the complicated controls.  He was gasping, and all the while his glazing eyes remained fixed grimly on the form of the comet, toward which he and the strange craft he had built were hurtling.  Could he reach it?  He must!...

2017 May 25th:  

HEARTS LEAPED IN 1905

If a "History of Excitement" is ever written, I suggest a chapter on the year 1905.  Until today, I suppose that date would most likely have reminded me most of the kingdom of Norway's resumption of independence after a 508-year gap.  That still seems to me the best political and cultural event of 1905.  But then I got browsing again in Michael J Crowe's The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750-1900 - shifting my attention this time to Mars' putative canals...

Last November I had a phase of adorning my Diary with quotes from that marvellous compendium.  I can't resist going back to it now and quoting some more.  For it seems that there were some real moments when the general public could reasonably believe that the canals had actually been proved to exist - that they had been photographed.  Imagine what that must have been like to hear!  This is what the book says (page 527-8):

...From Flagstaff in mid-1905 flowed reports of such conclusive evidence that the new B.A.A. president, A C D Crommelin, took it as decisive proof of the canals, and an American author stated that the "hot controversy [over the reality of the canal observations] may now be considered definitely settled..."

This dramatic development was Lowell's announcement that on May 11, 1905, one of his staff. Carl Otto Lampland (1873-1951), had succeeded in photographing canals on Mars.  While Lowell circulated this news in numerous papers and personally carried it to Europe in late summer of 1905, an excited Schiaparelli wrote him "I should never have believed it possible," and Mark Wicks publicly predicted that the illusion theory of the canals "will doubtless now be relegated to obscurity." 

If I had been alive then, I doubtless would have thought, that's it, we're definitely not alone, Mars is inhabited by intelligent beings...

Of course the effect must have been different in those days, insofar as after a discovery of that sort you wouldn't expect further information to come flooding in as fast as you'd expect it nowadays.  Nowadays it's a matter of sending a better space-probe than the last one, whereas back then it was a matter of building a bigger observatory than the last one.  And even when the observatory got built, there was a limit to what you could expect to see from it.  No adaptive optics existed then, to circumvent atmospheric turbulence.  Bigger mirrors could gather more light, but couldn't steady it.  So in 1905 a sudden conviction that there were intelligent beings on Mars might well co-exist with an equally strong conviction that centuries might pass before we could learn significantly more about them.

What happened next?  Nothing clear-cut.  No abrupt refutation.  Strangely, it just sort of peters out:

...In Lowell's late 1906 Mars and its Canals, he reported that in various photographs "thirty-eight canals were counted... and one double..."  Anxious for even better images from the 1907 opposition, Lowell funded an expedition to the Andes led by the Amherst astronomer David Todd (1855-1939), accompanied by Earl C Slipher of Lowell's staff.  Slipher's three months at this Chilean observatory netted 13,000 new images, while Lampland and Lowell, photographing from Flagstaff, secured 3,000.  In these, Lampland, Lowell, and Slipher sighted numerous canals.  Todd, however, at first saw none, but by late 1907 he announced "Almost all the photographs exhibit Martian canals, so called...," and in 1908 he claimed "our plates ought to silence forever the optical-illusion theoriests."  Lampland's Martian photographs, although awarded a medal by the Royal Photographic Society, neither silenced the illusion theorists nor fully satisfied most Mars experts.  Less than one-fourth inch in diameter, these photographs would not stand reproduction without loss of their fine detail, promoting a practice of authors publishing them along with drawings showing the unreproducible detail they claimed to see in the originals.  In at least one case, a journal labeled the drawings photographs, causing further confusion.  Moreover, when experts examined the negatives, many saw no canals or only diffuse markings or different figures in photos of the same region.  In short, the old problems had reappeared...

2017 May 24th:  

POT LUCK ON VENUS

Is it conceivable that a culture might invent space travel without any form of telemetry or remote sensing?  Might we have developed a sufficiently non-expensive and adaptable form of space vehicle, that enabled us to explore without sending probes out first?

I am intrigued by this question; I really don't know the answer.  Certainly it's not the way our culture does things; I've grumbled often enough before, of how our probes spoil the suprises.  Fortunately, the folk in the OSS, bless their hearts, tend to favour the more direct approach.

How's this for a leap in the dark -

Before the first ship from Earth made a landing on Venus, there was much speculation about what might be found beneath the cloud layers obscuring that planet's surface from the eyes of all observers.

One school of thought maintained that the surface of Venus was a jungle, rank with hot-house moisture, crawling with writhing fauna and man-eating flowers.  Another group contended hotly that Venus was an arid desert of wind-carved sandstone, dry and cruel, whipping dust into clouds that sunlight could never penetrate.  Others prognosticated an ocean planet with little or no solid ground at all, populated by enormous serpents waiting to greet the first Earthlings with jaws agape.

But nobody knew, of course.  Venus was the planet of mystery.

When the first Earth ship landed there, all they found was...

2017 May 23rd:  

(1) POINT MISSED IN YESTERDAY'S DIARY

Silly of me not to mention one of the best Moments of Amaze - especially as I'd quoted it in a recent entry (4th May).  I refer to the moment in Leigh Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon, when Matt Carse sees the Martian ocean and realizes he has fallen through Time.

It's especially good in that it hits the reader at the same time as it hits the hero (provided that the reader has somehow managed to escape having read the blurb on the back of the book, which gives the game away).

(2) SECRETIVE O.S.P.

We're used to the idea that Man went to the Moon in a blaze of publicity.  Doubtless it would have been impossible, in a democratic regime, to keep so gigantic and expensive a project hidden.

The fictional old space program, also, was often carried out openly, for example in Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon, Clarke's Prelude to Space and Walters' Operation Columbus.  The first of these was carried out by private-enterprise; the others were government projects; but all three were known to all the world as they progressed towards completion.

However, interestingly, we do also get some hush-hush projects.  It's not surprising that the reclusive Cavor should shun publicity for his private voyage in The First Men in the Moon.  But more gigantic state-sponsored efforts can also be done on the quiet.  The first trip to Venus, which leads to such disastrous consequences in Eric Frank Russell's terrific Three To Conquer, is shrouded in such secrecy that it takes a telepath to alert the authorities to the fact that the ship has returned with its crew possessed by aliens.  And in Charles Eric Maine's Countdown (1959) takes place on an out-of-the-way island - where a revolutionary drive is being tested, a drive which may give mankind the freedom of space.  The project's isolation renders it vulnerable to its enemy - a force from the future, which is trying to prevent its success. 

Charles Eric Maine is good at assembling a cast of characters and showing how they react under pressure.  The intensifying crisis on the island makes the book a memorable read.  Like Three to Conquer, it's great Fifties paranoia.  Recommended.

2017 May 22nd:   

THE MOMENT OF AMAZE

In tales of stunning discovery, there's naturally a high point for the reader at the stage when the astounding truth is revealed to the protagonist.  It may or may not be the case that the reader is ahead of the protagonist, having been forewarned, via dramatic irony, what is in store.  But be that as it may, it is important for the moment of amaze to be well handled.  It is well done in Out of the Silent Planet, when the kidnapped Dr Ransom has to face the idea that he is in a space-ship.  It is well done in Burroughs' Pirates of Venus, when Carson Napier finds he can live, after all, on the planet.  It is very well done in No Man Friday by Rex Gordon, when the crashlanding astronaut, to his own astonishment, realizes he is thinking seriously of being able to survive.

2017 May 21st:   

COMPLEX DATES

Addicted as I am to far-fetched analogies, allow me to inflict on you the following whimsy:

Just as, in mathematics, the 1-dimensional real-number line can be expanded into a 2-dimensional Argand diagram by the addition of complex numbers, so the time-line of "real dates" could be expanded into two dimensions by the addition of fictional dates.

We then have a time-graph where the real dates are along the x-axis, with y co-ordinates all zero, and the imaginary dates are above and below.

Example:

Arthur C Clarke writes Prelude to Space in 1947.  That date of publication is a real date in the real world.  Its co-ordinate on the time-graph is therefore (1947, 0). 

The novel is about the first trip to the Moon, set in the year 1978.  Its action therefore can be plotted on the graph at the co-ordinates (1947, 1978).  You see, the x co-ordinate gives when the tale was written, the y co-ordinate the year in which it is set.

Likewise the setting of Wells' The Time Machine would be plotted on the point with co-ordinates (1895, 802701).

Of course some stories straddle many fictional years.  Continuous narratives of this sort might be plotted as lines rather than as points.  More episodic tales might be better represented as clusters of points.  H P Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time would have points scattered far and wide!

One further stretch of the idea:

We could expand the system into three dimensions!

In which case, you may ask, what will be the purpose of the z co-ordinate?

Here's what I'm thinking:

While the x value gives the real date when the story appears, and the y value gives the fictional date of the action in the story, the z value might give a date predicted or conceived or imagined by a character in the story.

So, for instance: Now, in 2017, you write a tale set in the year 2345.  One of your characters speculates on what the world might be like after another thousand years have passed.  His imaginings would therefore have the co-ordinates (2017, 2345, 3345).

Hmm... is this getting a bit tenuous?  I suggest we stop here; three dimensions ought to be enough for now, and it's been a long day.

2017 May 20th:   

GHOSTLY TWITCHES FROM THE OSS

Here's an idea for a tale:

Treating the OSS as an actual dimension of reality rather than a mere literary genre, one might then link that dimension with ours, via certain disturbances which have been known to occur. 

By this I mean, that we could interpret the occasional observed real-time changes in our NSS as some kind of twitchy transferred effects, a sort of metaphorical translation of events in the OSS dimension.

Consider the impact of Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 upon Jupiter in 1994.  There might, in AD 1994 in the OSS dimension, have been an epic space-war around Jupiter way, in which projectiles were fired at the giant planet, while in our NSS dimension these events are represented by a comet-crash.

Then again one might, in this kind of parallel scenario, make something of the observations by Kozyrev in 1958 of the transient white patch in the lunar crater Alphonsus.  And of the occasional landslips recorded on Mars by orbiter surveys.

The most violent explosion witnessed by Man in the Solar System, so far as I know, was that seen by the naked eye on 18th June 1178, when according to the chronicler Gervase of Canterbury a huge flash was seen on the Moon.  This is now thought to be the impact which formed the crater called Giordano Bruno.  At least, that's the theory.  I have heard doubts cast upon the idea - doubts based on the calculation that an impact of such magnitude would also have caused ejecta to rain upon Earth, causing havoc which surely ought to have been mentioned by the writers of that time.  Anyhow, be that as it may, it could be roped in to the story.  War on the Moon?  A mad scientist's experiment gone wrong?

Note that I am not suggesting way-out causes for these events in our dimension - only that they might show a parallelism with events elsewhere.

The dimensions might, as it were, rhyme with one another.  Well, it's an idea.

2017 May 19th:  

POETIC LICENCE AMONG THE ASTEROIDS: THE CASE OF LOCALISED GRAVITY

BY F.R.LEAVIS

Only kidding!  Naughty of me to take the great man's name in vain.  But, hey, what a title for a paper in a high-brow literary journal...

Anyhow, let me define "localised gravity" as I use the phrase.

I mean the kind of gravity that can lead to super-heavy planetoids in the OSS - planetoids which in reality would have disturbed the orbits of neighbouring planets out of recognition, and could certainly not have gone undetected, but which in OSS tales, to the surprise of reader and protagonist, can be "discovered".

Heavy planetoids can have enough gravity to keep an atmosphere and evolve life.

Such as the environment which produces the deadly butterflies of Thor...

...The surface of the planetoid was surprisingly flat, as if the great weight of each particle of ground had furthered the process of leveling off.  Like Phobos and Deimos, satellites of Mars, Thor had a curvature so great that the eye could easily detect it.  With no clouds to hamper them, they could see the  horizon, less than a mile away in each direction.  Numerous small gray bushes were the only break in the monotony of the reddish landscape.

A hundred yards or so away from them, a tiny object sprang into the air, and settled rapidly down again.

"Animal life," remarked the gloomy, white-faced pseudo-android.

Several others of the tiny objects leaped up closer at hand.

"They're butterflies!" exclaimed Loring.

"I've seen their kind on Jupiter," observed the Jovian.

Blackbeard was staring at the insect-like creatures uneasily.

"I wasn't expecting this," he said.  "We'd better return to the ship."

The pretended robot looked at him with puzzled eyes.  "Why?  They're no more than a couple of inches long.  They can't be dangerous!"

"They have wings, but despite the presence of an atmosphere, they can't fly.  That means that they're too heavy to be supported by matter of any ordinary kind.  And if their bodies are of heavy matter, we don't want to tangle with them..."

2017 May 17th:  

POUL ANDERSON AND A FAR-FUTURE MOON

A pioneering star-drive, insufficiently test-run, is used too soon for an emergency getaway from nuclear catastrophe on Earth.  The starship returns to find that three billion years have passed. 

Epilogue (Analog, March 1962) is one of Anderson's terrific stories, giving the reader a breathtakingly original view of a far-future Earth in which Man's demise in atomic war has triggered unplanned machine evolution.  He doesn't just state it vaguely but shows us how natural selection might, in those circumstances, apply to machines, and lead to a machine ecology.

However, I won't offer a proper critique of the tale here.  It is almost entirely about Earth, whereas I wish to focus on the little glimpse we get of the Moon, near the beginning of the story:

...Still the boat spiralled inward.  Now the moon drifted across his view.  In those eons since the Traveler left home, Luna had retreated from Earth: not as far as might have been predicted...but nonetheless, now it was only a tarnished farthing.  Through the ship's telescopes it had looked like itself.  Some new mountains, craters, and maria, some thermal erosion of old features, but Thurshaw could identify much of what he once knew.  It was grotesque that the moon should endure when everything else had changed...

2017 May 16th:  

NIVEN AND CLARKE ON THE CUSP

Shall we say, to speak metaphorically, that on the boundary between the Old and New Solar Systems, one can still get an OSS glow through an NSS filter?

I suggest three ways this can happen:

1 - if the story is written on the chronological cusp, so that some new space-probe knowledge coexists with some older ideas - e.g. in Clarke's Transit of Earth (1971), where OSS and NSS vie for influence in the mind of a realist writer, and Niven's portrayal of a mostly dry, modernistic-flavoured Mars which yet has intelligent Martians, in Eye of an Octopus and At the Bottom of a Hole (both 1966).  Clarke's The Sands of Mars (1951) and Earthlight (1955) also fit here, because of their allowance of lunar and Martian life, coupled with an awareness of these worlds' harsh conditions.

2 - if we consider a story's mood and tone, to be that of a hard science veneer over a romantic attitude; perhaps the colourful conflagration on Pluto described in Niven's World of Ptavvs (1966 again) is an instance of this.

3 - if we focus on the old space program, which means that the OSS world we are really focusing on is the better timeline of Old Earth.  Tales for which this criterion applies are too numerous to mention.  The worlds which they explore may be quite NSS in realism, but if the Earth that sends out the expeditions and establishes the colonies is the good old Earth of classic OSS fiction (in which governments adhere to the correct space-script which says that you must colonize the Moon and then colonize Mars, and do it fairly soon and with the recognizably human, respectable and lovable  non-weirdos that fill the pages of Heinlein, Walters and Clarke), then the tales are OSS in my book.  e.g. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust (1961) - which, unlike his Earthlight of six years before, contains no mention of native lunar plant-life; and Niven's Becalmed in Hell (1965).

Category 2 is the one I have found hardest to pin down.  Here's some of that Plutonian firestorm:

...Evanescent mountains of hydrogen snow, smooth and low, like a tray of differently sized snowballs dropped from a height.  They rose gently before the slowing ship, rank behind rank, showing the tremendous breadth of the range.  But they couldn't show its length.   Kzanol/Greenberg could see only that the mountains stretched half around the horizon; but he could imagine them marching from pole to pole around the curve of the world.  As they must.  As they did...

2017 May 15th:  

THE ROCKY MAIN

- so is the Asteroid Belt termed in Michael Martinez' Daedalus trilogy, in obvious analogy with the buccaneer-infested Spanish Main of old Earth.

That realm of cosmic rubble certainly lends itself to tales of piracy and lawlessness.  It's a gift to writers of gung-ho adventurous narrative.

Even the more cerebral Isaac Asimov can be influenced that way by the Belt, in his Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids.

...In a sense it was good.  The asteroids had formed steppingstones out toward the major planets.  In a sense it was bad.  Any criminal who could escape to the asteroids was safe from capture by all but the most improbable chance.  No police force could search every one of those flying mountains.

The smaller asteroids were no man's land.  There were well-manned astronomical observatories in the largest, notably on Ceres.  There were beryllium mines on Pallas, while Vesta and Juno were important fueling stations.  But that still left fifty thousand sizable asteroids over which the Terrestrial Empire had no control whatever.  A few were large enough to harbor fleets.  Some were too small for more than a single speed-cruiser with additional space, perhaps, for a six-month supply of fuel, food, water.

And it was impossible to map them...  asteroids were forever being "lost", then "found" again...

2017 May 14th:  

VERTICALITY

One of the much-perused volumes of my childhood - a book I have beside me as I write - is Our World In Space And Time (1959), published by Odhams Press; no author given.  It's a beautifully produced survey of history, natural history, geography and astronomy, written for young readers in a non-patronising tone.  I have included a picture here from page 179, "Saturn from its satellite Titan". 

Ah, those were the days when dramatic needle-peaks could be found all over the System.

It's a common theme in sf than inhabitants of heavy worlds will tend to be short and wide, while those of light worlds will tend to be tall and thin.  The idea makes sense; and to a brainy chap like C S Lewis it also made sense that the same theme would apply to the physical characteristics of worlds.  In particular, of low-gravity worlds.  Thus, his Mars in Out of the Silent Planet has a topographical theme of verticality: memorably he describes the tall, thin mountains lining the sides of his Martian canyons.

It seems that Lewis got it wrong.  His intelligent assumption seems not to be borne out in practice.  Admittedly, Mars has very high mountains, but their slopes are not particularly steep.  This could not have been known before space probes.

The near side of the Moon, on the other hand, was surveyed before the space age, and calculations from measurements of shadow could reveal the heights and hence the gradients of its mountains.  This didn't stop artists from exaggerating the slopes.  One might defiantly say, that the artists were wiser than the cartographers, in knowing what lunar landscapes ought to look like. 

Arthur C Clarke however went for the literal truth.  In A Fall of Moondust (1961) we get a typical insistence on realism:

...it was an unfortunate fact that the majority of lunar peaks were a severe disappointment.  The huge craters which looked so impressive on photographs taken from Earth turned out upon close inspection to be gently rolling hills, their relief grossly exaggerated by the shadows they cast at dawn and sunset.  There was not a single lunar crater whose ramparts soared as abruptly as the streets of San Francisco, and there were very few that could provide a serious obstacle to a determined cyclist.  No one would have guessed this, however, from the publications of the Tourist Commission, which featured only the most spectacular cliffs and canyons, photographed from carefully-chosen vantage-points.

Clarke gets away with this artistically because in his very avoidance of exaggeration he brings us closer to a feeling of being solidly there, on the Moon.  His disclaimers function as wakeners.  And once we are wakened, once we are there with him on the Moon, the reality of it swamps us with its own bracing magic.  Clarke was exceptional in this ability to assemble novels with "plain" truths which yet form into an ensemble that glows with as much wonder as any science-fantasy.

And of course there's the wonder of an old space program that grew as it ought to have grown, into lunar colonies in what is now our own century.

Anyhow, it all goes to show how the OSS is win-win.  You get great lack of realism, mingled with great realism.  Eat your cake and have it - vertical or horizontal.

2017 May 13th:   

CATHEXIS IN C S LEWIS AND HEINLEIN

"To cathect" is "to invest something with an emotional charge".  If we "cry for the moon", we have somehow cathected the moon so as to yearn for it.  It has become, for us, more than a dead lump of rock.

But is it just "for us" that it is more than it seems, or is it more than it seems really?

The question can be asked not only of the objects in space but of the immensity and grandeur of space itself, and of any vista.  C S Lewis took two different lines on this.  As far as mere magnitudes are concerned, he poured scorn on the "clownish amazement" of those who regard them as intrinsically impressive or important.  (He has some effective words on this topic in Perelandra.)  On the other hand, in his pamphlet The Abolition of Man, he took pains to make the point that when we express strong feelings of admiration for something, when we are aware of the sublimity of a great landscape for instance, it is not just our inner emotions we are describing; we intend to make a real point about the nature or essence of what we are seeing.

So, which is it?

..."Why do you want to go to the moon so badly, Mr Harriman?"

"Captain, it's the one thing I've really wanted to do all my life - ever since I was a young boy.  I don't know whether I can explain it to you or not.  You young fellows have grown up to rocket travel the way I grew up to aviation.  I'm a great deal older than you are, at least fifty years older.  When I was a kid practically nobody believed that men would ever reach the moon.  You've seen rockets all your lives, and the first to reach the moon got there before you were a young boy.  When I was a boy they laughed at the idea.  But I believed - I believed.  I read Verne, and Wells, and Smith, and I believed that we could do it - that we would do it.  I set my heart on being one of the men to walk the surface of the moon, to see her other side, and to look back on the face of the earth hanging in the sky.  I used to go without my lunches to pay my dues in the American Rocket Society, because I wanted to believe that I was helping to bring the day nearer when we would reach the moon.  I was already an old man when that day arrived.  I've lived longer than I should, but I would not let myself die... I will not! - until I have set foot on the moon."

2017 May 12th:  

A CROP OF CLUFFS

For some unknown reason as I was browsing in my magazine collection today, I stumbled across far more CLUFFs than usual.  Here's one of them:

"Here's the breakdown of figures," Thomas went on calmly.  "Half our steel, as well as the billion tons we sell to Mars, is mined with great difficulty on Jupiter.  We couldn't operate those mines in case of war because the mines are hopelessly vulnerable to attack..."

2017 May 11th:  

SUDDEN CHANGES OF MOOD

Before I begin properly, here's another apology.  I have missed 2 consecutive days of the Diary - can't remember ever missing that big a chunk of time before.  If I had organized myself better I could have continued my contributions from the hospital bed, at least to some extent.  Anyway, the good news is that the site has thrived in my absence - a record number of pages viewed in one day on the 9th of May (1,153, no less).

And now for today's topic.

We read adventure stories to enlarge our experience, vicariously to place ourselves in the situation of the hero, and thus to live more than we would otherwise; but this procedure can be further extended if the hero, whose soul we are sharing, is himself likewise flexible.  A good writer will therefore be able to do a "yes, but" operation on the consciousness of his protagonist.

2017 May 7th:  

SIMAK ON THE MOON

Clifford Simak is usually at his best on Earth, often spilling over into the alternate-Earths which are a speciality of his (see All Flesh is Grass, Ring Around the Sun, Awk House).

He did however make one dedicated foray onto the Moon, in The Trouble With Tycho (1961). The golden bucolic Simak atmosphere has no place there, of course, and I have tended not to rate the book highly in comparison with the few key Moon classics.  When Clarke writes of the Moon in Earthlight, he is on ground of which he is a master - his style can infuse a numinous fascination into the airless rockscape.  Simak isn't noted for this.  However, when I reread The Trouble With Tycho the other day (soon done - only 115 pages), I clicked with it more than before.    

...So I went bowling down that dust alley - dust that had never known a track before; dust all pitted by tiny one-inch craters pinged out by the whizzing bits of debris that come storming in from space; dust that had piled up for ages, chiseled off the walls by the endless hammering of the radiations, by the clicking bits of sand moving miles a second, by the slow patience of the heat and cold that spanned hundreds of degrees.

It's a mean life and a bitter one and hard, but there's a lot of glory and of beauty in the very harshness of the Moon.  She is waiting for a slip to kill you, she has no mercy in her, she simply doesn't give a damn; but there are times when she can cut your breath with the very wonder of her, when she can take your soul and lift it high into the black emptiness of space and give you peace and insight.  And there are other times when she simply strikes you numb.

That's the way she had me now, sitting stiff and rigid, with my throat bone-dry and the fine sweat standing out, whooping down that alley where a trap might wait for me and not a chance to dodge it.

I made it.  My number just didn't happen to be up that time...

2017 May 6th:  

FAIL-SAFE CONSEQUENCES

Supposing civilization falls, then rises again much later, but that our remote successors inherit a space-faring technology which has been made in some respects fool-proof.  Then they might find themselves using space-ships without understanding them; zooming around in a space of which the true dimensions they do not understand.  This of course is eerily conveyed in Heinlein's generation-starship tale Universe, but also in our sub-genre by van Vogt in Empire of the Atom.  Just consider this superb example of dramatic irony:

...Spaceships, like all instruments, weapons and engines of transport and war known since legendary times, had their limitations.  They were the fastest thing possessed by man, but just how fast, no one had ever been able to decide.  At the time of the invasion of Mars, the prevailing belief was that spaceships attained the tremendous speed of a thousand miles an hour in airless space.  Since the voyage to Mars required from forty to a hundred days - depending upon the respective positions of the two planets - the distance of Mars at its nearest was estimated at one million miles.

It was felt by thousands of intelligent people that this figure must be wrong.  Because, if it were correct, then some of the remoter stars would be hundreds of millions of miles away.  This was so obviously ridiculous that it was frankly stated by many that the uncertainty reflected on the ability and learning of the temple scientists...

2017 May 5th:  

RESUMING LONG-INTERRUPTED COLONISATION

In most OSS tales there is a reasonable degree of cultural continuuity with the author's present day, but in an ineresting minority of backgrounds we are given to understand that the exploration of our neighbouring worlds has only resumed after a long lapse.  Such must be the case in van Vogt's Empire of the Atom and The Wizard of Linn.  It is also the case in Barrington Bayley's Soul of a Robot (1974) - a novel almost entirely set on Earth, but with the added perspective of the Emperor Charrane's ambitious policy of Martian reconquest, attempting, like a latter-day Justinian, to restore an old sway.

...The lead story was splashed right across the front page in headlines two inches tall.

CHARRANE CONQUERS MARS!

News reached Tansiann yesterday that the Mars Expeditionary Force has added interplanetary territories to the New Empire.  Landing on the Red Planet a month ago, the Emperor's crack space commandos have since been fighting a successful campaign to bring this strategically important world under the imperial writ.

It is now little over a year since explorers first discovered that human communities still exist on Mars despite having been cut off for eight centuries from the mother planet, basing their way of life on the deep fissures and rills in the Martian surface where they have learned how to maintain a breathable atmosphere.  On hearing of the Red Planet's continuing habitation the Emperor Charrane had immediately pronounced it a top priority to "recover the ancient Mars possessions".  The Emperor's early triumph will go a long way towards substantiating his boast that the Empire will eventually "rival the glory of Tergov"...

2017 May 4th:  

YESTERDAY PART TWO

More on planetary change.  I thought I had come to the end of my survey, but I must be slipping: how could I have omitted to mention a tale that encompasses one of the more dramatic long-term changes in the most visited of our neighbouring worlds?

2017 May 3rd:  

PLANETARY CHANGE

- Or, as I might term it, "planetary character development".  Many tales relate the change or maturation of their human protagonists.  But some stories go further, and narrate or imply fundamental changes in the planets themselves.

My favourite OSS scenarios are, mostly, those in which this does not happen - in which people change but their worlds do not, or not noticeably.  I love those sprawling series like those of Burroughs and Brackett in which various adventures take place amid the stable environment of the multifarious worlds.  Or the Hamilton OSS, much of which forms a quasi-series because many of its components are quite easy to link, though apart from Captain Future he did not seem concerned to write series in an explicit sense.

But the planetary-change tales are also important, and do include a small number of my favourites, as well as some which I read less often.

The War of the Worlds implies a gradual, inexorable change in Mars - an environmental decline that is the motive for the invasion of Earth.  A sharper change in the Red Planet is carried out deliberately at the end of Arthur C Clarke's top-notch colonization epic, The Sands of Mars.  I call it an epic because, although it's not an especially long book, it makes an epic impression on me.

But the majority of planetary-change tales involve Earth.  They are too numerous to list or even to summarize.  They range from the relatively obscure but still interesting - such as A E van Vogt's The Winged Man (in which Earth's lands have turned into mud by A D 24,999 and men have to live in the sky) - to famous classics such as Clarke's far-future saga, The City and the Stars.  Sometimes the change is the result of invasion, as in the drastic "Venusiforming" recounted in Clark Ashton Smith's The Metamorphosis of Earth.

Getting back to the other planets: a borderline case of planetary change is the Uranus depicted in Uranian Gleams.  I say "borderline" because, since the transformation that it implies is a retrospective "reality-change", in a sense it swallows itself up and no longer has happened.  This surely is how one must read Gibson's words:

...Everyone knows the bare outline of the events which ushered in our present era: how the Second Great Fleet did succeed in reaching Arclour and ... how that discovery retro-triggered our retro-Fostering of Ooranye, that is to say, the grafting of Ooranye's true history onto the history of our solar system.

So if the Fleet had not reached Arclour, the First Terran Contact eight Uranian years previously would not have happened either.  The future re-writes the past. 

Otherwise the world of Ooranye would be known to us still as the lifeless gas/ice giant Uranus, whereas now that tilt, and the lifelessness, never have been.  Shunted, grafted retrospectively onto this reality is the real Uranus, become fully itself...  That's what we accomplished, that was our half of the pincer which adjusted reality, the other half being the triumph of Sunnoad Iyen Noom 80525 and the Second Great Fleet.

Deep stuff; but reality-change is bound to be a rather special case.  Is there anything more 'normal' that I can mention?

Well, there are those stories which relate or involve the destruction of the asteroid progenitor planet.  And there are the rather sad stories of other planets and worlds being destroyed, including John Wyndham's wonderful Time to Rest, which post-dates the destruction of Earth.

I have now come to the end of my fairly short survey.  If anyone can add to it, feel free!