the sunport vista:
zendexor's
oss
diary

2025

2025 January 24th:

THE SINGLETON SOLARIANS

Last night, while re-reading Charles Williams' weird novel about anti-intellectualism, revolution and will-power, Shadows of Ecstasy (1931), I found the following great sentence on page 36:

A thing that seemed had at least the truth of its seeming.

Worth pondering, that, and vital to the philosophy of Old Solar System literature...

Coincidentally I had also been re-perusing the February 2001 issue of Sky & Telescope, which inspired me to wonder what excuses might allow one to use, in a story, the magazine's awesome images of scenes on the sun.

2025 January 22nd:

WHERE NEXT?

As readers may have noticed, I am gradually transferring to the site the texts of my books which are now out of print.  By count of titles, I am now a third of the way through the task (Uranian Gleams and Valeddom done; still to come are the volumes of the Kroth trilogy plus Man of the World). It's a long job because I'm free to revise as I go - a second chance which in its way is most welcome.

The question now is, which to embark upon next?  If I choose Man of the World, it will mean first of all going over the chapters (17 out of the 37) which are already on site.  That sort of gives me a run-up.  If on the other hand I choose Kroth, then I'm putting new stuff on site from the word go.

The thing to do is to sleep on it...

Expanding away from considerations of my own work, a theme which often causes me to wonder is: how far did my favourite authors know their own strengths and weaknesses?  Those whose performance deteriorated in the later part of their careers: were they just getting tired, or is the slump in quality a proof that they never understood what made them great in the first place?

I suspect the latter.

How far can one assess oneself at all?  I believe my worst story is Outlaws of Neptune; it's the one that would cause me to go down on my knees and beg for it not to be included in an anthology (infinitesimal chance).  But then why haven't I deleted it from the site?  Because...  it's not actually doing any harm, and anyhow, I simply don't know...

2025 January 20th:

A BIRTHDAY GIFT

I'm 71 today and my wife Mary has given me a book called Clark Ashton Smith: A Critical Guide to the Man and his Work by Steve Behrens (The Borgo Press, 2013).

It's 217 pages long and I'm on page 50.  It's well worth reading.  The trouble with trying to write about Smith is that paucity of knowledge about the man makes it hard to write a fully detailed biography, but Behrens does reveal quite a bit, and besides, he is good at discussing the stories, which are the main reason why we bother to remember CAS at all: namely, as the "emperor of dreams", a unique author of the colourfully fantastic. 

Behrens makes good points, for example rightly emphasizing the sense of loss which the tales so often convey.  My one caveat so far, is that the reader new to CAS might get the wrong idea from phrases such as "Smith's stress on mood, at the expense of action..."  I know what he means, but it's misleading to put it like that.  It might make some readers think that not much happens in the stories.  Really, if you were transported into the role of protagonist in (for example) a Zothique or Averoigne tale, you'd certainly feel pretty soon that quite enough was happening to you! 

Indeed, what Smith's moody settings ensure is that the events in them seem all the more real.

2025 January 19th:

NORSE MYTH, MERCURY AND THE PRIMORDIAL OSS

The latest email in my inbox from researcher and Guess The World contributor Lone Wolf has filled my head with a burst of ideas that beg for further development:

I have often thought recently what a pity it is that nobody has noticed the similarity between, on the one hand, the Old Mercury with its synchronous rotation and two distinct hemispheres, and on the other the cosmic model of the old Norse myths with its Muspelheim ("Flame-World"), Niflheim ("Mist-World") or Myrkheim ("Dark-World") where the frost giants live, and between them the middle earth of the humans called Midgard (lit. "Middle Wall"), encircled by the world serpent ("Midgard's Worm"), which causes the tides, and which could be a suitable image for the Twilight Belt. 

This could provide such an epic setting for a story, be it a kind of other-planet fantasy, like The Worm Ouroboros which is supposed to be set on Mercury but in fact doesn't seem like it at all, or something along the lines of the ancient astronauts theory with a fictional history of the pre-human races in the Old Solar System.  Thus, the Aesir could really have been gods of the ancient Mercurian civilization, who genetically engineered the Mercurian humans; the other gods or Vanir from Vanaheim might have been Venusians; there could also have been the Yötuns or giants from the outer planets or their moons - in fact, in the Edda, their homeland is called Yötunheimar /plural!/ or "Worlds of Giants", etc.

Well, I guess a story like that could still be written someday, but it would never produce such an impact which it could have had if it had been written when the Old Mercury with its Twilight Belt was considered astronomical fact.  It might even have been proclaimed a plausible hypothesis of the ancient forgotten past, some of the stories of the golden age being advertised as such in the pulp magazines (like the moon stories of O.A. Kline, E. Hamilton and R. H. Romans, not to mention the famous hoax of the "Shaver Mystery"), whereas nowadays it would be only an eccentric fantasy...  (Of course, it could be on Venus too - the old model of Schiaparelli with synchronous rotation, but this one is much less known and the notion about a planet with Dayside and Nightside in the SF is habitually associated with Mercury. In fact I can name only 3 authors who wrote about synchronous-rotating Venus - Garrett P. Serviss, Clark Ashton Smith and Stanley G. Weinbaum.) 

My most immediate response to all this is an excited suspicion that Lone Wolf has perhaps understated his case.  The tales as yet unwritten on the Norse-myth theme he suggests might actually work every bit as well as they could have done in the pulp era.  In fact they might work even better - because the author would be under some extra creative pressure to justify the way the scenario contradicts current scientific claims.  Under that pressure, and in the hands of a powerful writer, the result could be tremendous.

To sum up: imagine ancient OSS-style Mercury, with two powerful native races, one on Dayside and one on Nightside.  One or both of them mould some life-plasm into humanoid servants (like the Old Ones did in Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness).  Note that these humans would be real Mercurians, because they would have been created by Mercurians; no hint of COMOLD here.  And as time goes on...  well, anything might happen as time goes on!

2025 January 10th:

HITCH-HIKING FROM WORLD TO WORLD

This is just a quickie to say that I chanced across a tale in my shelf of sf magazines, which I had not noticed before (it still happens), and which made me catch my breath in admiration for the audacity of the concept.  The story is by Ray Bradbury and it is called Rocket Skin (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Spring 1946).  In it, people hitch rides on rockets by clamping themselves magnetically onto the hulls!  About as far from realistic hard-science sf as you can get, I reckon.

If I had known of this idea when writing the page on Plying the spacelanes, would I have included a mention of it?  Probably.  I could have drawn an analogy between this sort of unorthodox travel and the "running the rails" by hoboes during the Great Depression.  Considerably more risky, though.

...Another hitch-hiker swam up out of the dark sky ocean and strove to connect.  George screamed him on.  The man failed.  He dove straight into the river of jet-flame!

Something to add to your not-to-do list.

2025 January 4th:

A GHOSTLY NUDGE FROM JUPITER

Without consciousness there would be no science, so let's view science as one mental construct, while fiction is another.  In fact, consider them as two dimensions of reality (fiction itself being a definite reality inside our heads whatever the accuracy or inaccuracy of its outside references).

In my current phase of browsing through my collection of astronomy magazines I came across an article titled Jupiter's Deep Mystery, by Thomas Dobbins and William Sheehan (Sky & Telescope, December 1999, p118-23), which make me feel as if the OSS solid-surface version of the planet - the view of it as a world with explorable places on it - were stretching out a ghostly tentacle to make my spine tingle with the idea, "Perhaps it's true after all".

Not quite enough to materialise a real hope, but at least an approach, the ghostly haunting of a nearness to hope, is provided by some observations of the South Equatorial Belt (SEB).  What brought me up sharp was to learn that eruptions in the SEB, when timed, have appeared to synchronize with the giant planet's axial rotation in such a way as to suggest a fixed origin somewhere down below!

To quote from the article:

...Surprisingly, our deepest insight into the mechanism and meaning of SEB revivals is not the brainchild of a theoretical astrophysicist but of an amateur astronomer, Elmer J. Reese.  Although he now lives in quiet retirement in Longview, Texas, Reese was a prolific contributor to the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers (ALPO) during the heyday of amateur planetary studies in the 1950s and early 1960s...  

...Despite the fact that most of Reese's observations were made with a humble 6-inch Newtonian reflector, his work was of such high quality that he was able to make the transition from amateur to professional astronomer.  In 1963 he was asked to join the staff of New Mexico State University Observatory...

...He reasoned that because these phenomena [SEB revivals] "invariably begin with the sudden appearance of a small dark spot near the latitude of the middle of the South Equatorial Belt, we might infer that material reaches the visible surface from an eruption of some kind..."

Then, confirmation of the idea that the source of the eruptions is fixed in the solid core of the planet came from subsequent correlation with output from Jovian radio sources.  Bingo!

Too good to be true, maybe, but still, mysterious and suggestive - and who really knows what's down there?

...According to John Rogers, Director of the Jupiter Section of the British Astronomical Association (BAA), the Reese sources are "sites of potential instability at which SEB eruptions tend to be triggered, but, given our present knowledge of the planet, they cannot be 'volcanoes' as originally envisaged.  They might perhaps be long-lived circulations or waves or even floating objects at a deep level...  Whatever the Reese sources may be, the instability always breaks first over them, just as clouds on Earth first form over mountains."

So there you are.  Next step: revise, amend, or refute our "present knowledge of the planet"!