the sunport vista:
zendexor's
oss
diary

2026

2026 September 1st:

BLURRING THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN FANTASY AND SF

I can't right now call to mind any examples of the above "blurring" which are set on our neighbouring worlds.
    Some might say that C S Lewis' Cosmic trilogy is one such, but I cannot agree, since he takes great care to make it plain that the Oyéresu and the lesser eldila are in principle scientifically verifiable.  As for Maleldil Himself, well, the ground of all existence is bound to transcend all categories, in whichever literary genre the attempt is made to treat of Him.  
    So, in the absence of extraterrestrial examples, I'll give one set on Earth.
    I came across it in my recent re-reading of L P Davies' The Land of Leys (1979) - a passage on page 171 concerning "black magic":

    "And it can be made to work...  Think of it as a formula, or a series of formulae...  It is an analogy by which one may reduce that which is incomprehensible to something understandable and acceptable.  The building up of power by different, but similar means; the creation of a force-field, if you like.  The Adept - the Magister - is your scientist.  With the help of certain sounds, scents, and symbols, he makes a force-field which is the key that is able to unlock a door and allow the entrance of things unimaginable..."   

Next for investigation would be whether any tales set on our neighbour worlds have achieved scenes of creepiness to match the best supernatural horror tales set on Earth.  For if (say) an M R James type of scenario were to happen on Mars, it would maybe force us to consider the sf/fantasy boundary in a new and interesting way.
    To anticipate another possible area of disagreement: some may say that the situations which make Eric John Stark shiver in some of the tales of Leigh Brackett, qualitatively overlap with Terran supernatural shuddering.  However, with the Brackett technique what is going on is, in my view, a borrowing of mood, rather than of theme.  Very well done, but just not closely related enough to count as the same kind of thing.
    Jack Vance in The Palace of Love has someone express the view that "haunted houses are to be found on Earth alone".  I wonder if he's right.

2026 August 29th:

ELASTIC EARTH

I used to be impatient with "lost world" stories set on Earth.  If you wish to write about new lands, why try to squeeze them into the terrain of a world which has been almost completely mapped?  Why not go and write about a different world?
    My view has changed for several reasons.  Here are three points to be made: 
    [1] The technical challenge of the above "squeezing" can itself be of interest to both writer and reader.
    [2] In any case you can easily regard the wide Earth as largely empty of intelligent life, though swarming with dim sentience.
    [3] Forget I said that.
    But now I intend to make an altogether different point.  Lost-world writers are in a sense not merely squeezing a setting into an out-of-the-way terrestrial location.  They are in effect stretching the Earth.
    Perhaps this need not apply to the Venezuelan tepui of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), the eponym of the genre.  The table-mountain formation actually exists, and the novel is set within its limits.  But succeeding writers have burst such constraints.
    The obvious example is the Tarzan stories.  Edgar Rice Burroughs' ape-man hero explores so many lost cities and empires in Africa, that the Dark Continent, huge though it is, couldn't possibly contain them all, or at any rate not if you allow for the extra distances between them which are demanded by the plot; unless, that is, the saga's version of Africa is made into something even bigger than the reality.
    The same may apply to H P Lovecraft's Antarctica.  Granted, it's a big place, and the "Mountains of Madness" are set in a region that was not surveyed at the time of writing, so the author may have adhered to credible speculation; but if you wish to suspend your disbelief so far as to allow that sinister austral realm's continuance into the present day, you need to 'stretch' Antarctica.
    I'm at a loss to describe how this operation is carried out, but it can be done.  At least, the action unquestionably does occur, sort of, in my mind.  (I wonder, does the idea click with any of you?)
    The main example I wish to give is the most daring one because it dates from as late as 1962, the publication date of James Blish's The Night Shapes, though the action takes place in 1906.
    American exile Kit Kennedy, alias "Ktendi" of the Wassabi tribe, is protesting to a member of the expedition that he is reluctantly guiding through a mysterious tract of the Belgian Congo [p.22]:

    "...This area's never been mapped, and there may be mountains ahead.  We aren't equipped to scale a range of any size."
    "Why not?"
    "Evidently you've never seen mountains in Africa.  They aren't worn down to nubbins, like the Alps, you know.  Most of them are new - great unweathered block-piles as raw as the mountains of the moon.  I myself have seen one thirty thousand feet high."
    "There is no such mountain," Stahl snorted.  "Everest isn't as high as that."
    "Everest is too old.  I know what I saw.  And I know how to triangulate, Stahl."

Preposterous, in ordinary terms, but if you just allow that part of Africa to balloon larger, the scenario becomes possible; and it had better happen that way, lest a great yarn lose out.
    One more thought: if we're allowed to stretch the Earth, we could stretch other worlds too.  In fact, really, ERB by the end of the Barsoom series was almost in the position of having to stretch Mars...

2026 August 24th:

A CALL FOR THE IMPLICIZER:
NOTES ON THE OSS OF FRANK BELKNAP LONG

Researcher/contributor Lone Wolf has been delving into the tales of this writer - see the recent CLUFFs and the extracts The thinking caps of Uranus and Dragonlike plants of Callisto.  
    As is often the case with OSS literature, we find a tantalizing lot of tidbits which tempt the reader to work at organizing, embellishing and, where necessary, amending the sources.
    I hereby share the latest reports from LW on the state of the FBL universe.

Email, 23rd August:

Unfortunately these worlds are almost never described directly in the stories of this series. There are only passing mentions scattered here and there or little pieces of memories and daydreaming at the best (I think there was a Plutonian scene somewhere among these too and also in the first story from the last week - a scene on Neptune, but only seen in a daydream and told in only one sentence or two). That's why I said that I am not at all sure if the pictures of the planets are consistent or just randomly created (thus I think I spotted a little contradiction about Callisto in one case described as sea world and in other - as having solid crust of some compound, but we can never be sure since there is never a general description and one can imagine that there may be seas or lakes on it, etc.; similarly in one place there is said that there Neptune isn't watery, but in another is mentioned a sandy beach and tidal zone there, etc.). It would be interesting to collect all these fragments and catalogue them by planet, but even if I had the time I don't have the text of all the stories, only about half of them and I can't find the missing ones online (as it seems, this series wasn't particularly popular and so it was forgotten - according to the bibliographies online it was re-edited only once as a book ten or fifteen years ago, but it doesn't exist in digital form). 

Email, 24th August:

It seems I've been mistaken in my previous email – there were actually several editions of this series in a book form. I found an article about it here:

https://adeeplookbydavehook.wordpress.com/2025/06/09/john-carstairs-space-detective-frank-belknap-long-1949-frederick-fell/

It contains some information about Frank Belknap Long and short resumes of all the stories. As I mentioned before, Satellite of Peril seems particularly interesting because it appears to be set on Io, but unfortunately I cannot find that issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories anywhere (despite what the author of the article says, that all the stories can be found online). I think in the same story was introduced the “Mimas mold” (whatever this is), which is used again in the final novelette (The Hollow World) without much explanation (there is a short description of its use in one of the excerpts I sent, but it is quite unclear – all I understood is that it was some kind of miniature vegetable organisms which are able to re-produce a tridimensional picture of a crime scene based on some residual infrared “aura” left by the human bodies).

Note from Zendexor:  All these clues furnish a clear motive for any determined reader to get cracking with the implicizer!

2026 August 11th:

PERCOLATIONS
TO PERSIA FROM MARS AND TO THE MAYANS FROM VENUS

More reflections from Lone Wolf, this time from an earlier email (21 May) which I have been meaning to include here for some time now:

Persia: Pārs (or Fārs, as it is now pronounced) sounds a lot like “Mars”. In Persian dictionaries I've seen the word “pārs” translated as “leopard”, which is most likely a loanword from the Turkic “bārs”, since the common Persian word for “leopard” is “palang”. This is also present in the Russian word “bars” ("барс") as synonym for “leopard”, which comes from the Turkic-Bulgar “Barıs”(hence the name “Boris”), the spirit of victory and war in the old Tengrian mythology of the Bulgars, who appears as big one-eyed leopard, which could have been once the name of the “Scythian Ares”, mentioned by Herodotus, who have been worshipped in the form of a sword (the Alp Barıs/Boris in the legends of Bulgarian Tengrianism also had his mystic sword of victory, which he presents to some great heroes, thus Attila himself was said to possess “Mars' sword”, etc.) and maybe even the name of Mars (also god of war!) derives from the same root (the labials B and M are often interchangeable, especially in the Turkic languages). And all this quite resembles Burroughs' name “Barsoom”, although it was probably inspired by euphony from the name “Mars” (the suffix “-oom” then is common for all Martian planetary names). And then his description of the traditional feud between red and green Martians resembles that between the settled Iranians and the nomad Turanians from the Persian epic legends (even the names of the green Martian tribes are similar to those of the Central Asian nomads: Thark sounds like “Turk”, “Warhoon” – like “Avar-Hun” (I think there was actually such tribal name, something like “Ouarkhun” in Central Asia, but can't remember it exactly now), etc. I can't say whether Burroughs actually got his ideas directly or indirectly from the Persian epic (I've come across some article online which assimilates them instead to the Theosophists' description of Atlantis and its races), but the similarity seems very close.
    Then the Mayan cities in the jungles and their landscape in general definitely give me a Venusian vibe. And the curious thing is that indeed the planet Venus was especially worshipped by the Central American cultures and its 8-year synodic period played a major role in their peculiar calendars. Then the famous “white bearded gods” (the Aztec Quetzalcóatl, the Mayan Kukulkan, etc.), bringers of civilization, were always associated with Venus and that's why sometimes in the earlier 'ancient astronaut' theories they were hypothesized to be Venusians (in one of the Aztec legends, if I remember correctly, Quetzalcóatl in the end jumps on a pyre and his hearth becomes the Evening Star, which was interpreted as a description of a rocket ship's take-off for Venus). Even the legendary lost lands like Mu (with its jungles and swamps, “the land of swampy hills” in an old mistranslation of a Mayan codex) and Atlantis (with its canal system of irrigation, described by Plato) invoke associations with the old traditional images of Venus and Mars respectively (Atlantis was also supposedly called “Red Land”, which reminds of the “red planet”, etc.).
    All these coincidences, although imaginary, are rather insistent, so that it may be speculated that they have their origin in the archetypes hidden in the collective unconscious. Thus for instance the Martian visions of the Swiss medium Hélène Smith also have characteristic Oriental aesthetics, which Théodore Flournoy explains with her particular tastes and interests, but she was nonetheless convinced all this information came from outside her own brain. The Martian language, which she presented in her spiritual communications, may be an infantile imitation of her native French, as Flournoy thought, but still it was not some random gibberish, but possessed its own original words and names (like f.e. “Espénié” for Mars, “Béniel” for Earth, “Arvâ” for the Sun, etc.). Could it be that she actually caught a glimpse from some alternative reality or a virtual world in the noosphere?

2026 August 9th:

STANLEY WEINBAUM, RPG AND CATASTROPHIC PLANETOGENESIS

A guest-entry from Lone Wolf:

I've completely forgotten how and where I found R.W. Cole's novel The Struggle for Empire,[see Towards the capital city of Neptune] but while checking the links on the last page I came again to the page of “Forgotten Futures” - a role-playing game (RPG) created by Marcus Rowland based on old scientific romances and science fiction, some of which are related to the OSS. Thus for instance the game “Forgotten Futures XI: Planets of Peril” is based on the worlds of Stanley Weinbaum from the stories of his so-called “planetary” sequence.
   file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/perilous%20planets%20RPG.pdf
    The pdf document contains a lot of information derived from the stories and systematized for use in the game: descriptions of planets, spaceships, technology, characters, plots, etc.; in particular on pages 14–16 are discussed the dates and chronology of the stories and some slight inconsistencies in them (I've noticed them myself, but then I thought that they were due to typos in the versions of the texts which I read online and so far I still haven't found time to study this fictional timeline in more details. Now it turns out that this has already been done by Marcus Rowland!).
    Also here expressed is the interesting background idea that the scientific justification of the descriptions of some OSS worlds in old SF was actually based on conclusions derived from the catastrophic (as opposed to the nebular) cosmogonic hypothesis, involving another star passing near the Sun and causing tidal eruption of matter in the latter, from which all the planets were born. That explains why in this version of planetogenesis it was considered possible that the planets should be younger and more or less similar in their chemical constitution and thus there could be heavy elements on the outer planets, the giants could be still hot or have solid surface, etc., just as they are often described in old SF stories. It never came to me to look at it from this point of view, but now it seems quite plausible: indeed, the variations of the catastrophic cosmogony are often described and used in the plots of some stories by authors like R.H. Romans, Leslie Stone and Edmond Hamilton.
    Anyway, this document is a rather useful resource for research on Stanley Weinbaum's OSS and the possible extensions of it (thus the author suggests that “adventures” can be set on worlds about which Weinbaum never wrote, like Mercury or the asteroids).
    There is also another game from this family that is related to the OSS – “Forgotten Futures II: The Log of the Astronef”, based on George Griffith's Honeymoon in Space, although the author admits that some of the “adventures” in it contradict the plot of the literary original. Well, I don't understand very well what those role-playing games are and how exactly they are played – from the descriptions it seems to me they're like something similar to the “psychodrama” in Poul Anderson's story The Saturn Game. Maybe I am just too old for such things, but I guess this is also another way of resurrecting the OSS.

2026 August 4th:

TIME OUT OF JOINT - LOGIC-OVERRIDE

Having just finished re-reading Philip K Dick's Time Out of Joint (1959) for the zillionth time (it's been one of my favourites for most of my life), I decided to remark upon something I noticed only on this latest enjoyment of the novel.  And in so doing, I wish to suggest a new criterion by which to judge a book's greatness.
    The ending of the story is brought about quite quickly - it's a novel which ends on page 187, and the plot-threads are tied up pretty fast in the last twenty or so pages before that.  I shan't summarise the plot, except to say (this will be no surprise to any PKD fan) that the protagonist's "home" environment, and its very culture and date, turn out to be a fake.  No, I shan't explain all the ins and outs of it; really this Diary entry is addressed to those who have read the book.
    Now, what did I notice this time, that I never noticed before in all my uncounted previous readings?
    I noticed that it is all resolved far too easily for it to count as a logical, believable solution.  To be specific: how did the agent Mrs Keitelbein, or Kesselbaum or whoever she is, manage to be at the right place for Ragle Gumm to meet her?  How was this arranged, and how come a rocket was available at exactly the right place and time for Gumm to be taken up at the end?
    But none of this is a defect of any kind.  What I'm leading up to saying is, that the logical shortcomings actually ENHANCE the book.  This sounds absurd; why not just say that it's a great story despite its lack of logic at the end?
    The reason I do not say that, is because a price would have to be paid in order to put the logic right.  A price paid by extra complication, by tightenings which would spoil the "magic"of the tale's structure.  As it is, that structure is perfect; the mood-path it traces couldn't be bettered.
    My conclusion: one necessary criterion for a great book is that it must fool the reader for decades into not noticing its flaws.  The more successfully it does that, the more powerful its magic must therefore be.  Far more powerful than if there were no flaws to disguise. 
    And we mature readers must play our part in allowing ourselves to be fooled, at least for long enough to allow the story to get under our intellectual radar.  I for one can certainly claim to have followed this advice!

2026 July 10th:

HURRAH FOR LONG SENTENCES

Not that I can't appreciate short ones - here is a passage from Fred Hoyle's October The First is Too Late in which two climbers in Scotland set off on a difficult slope that soon gets easier:

It took us up for about five hundred feet.  Then we were on the summit ridge in bright sunshine.  The rocks here were firm and warm.  We mounted quickly to the top.  It was going to be hot and a haze was already rising.  To the north the Mamores and Ben Nevis looked tremendous.  To the south were the ragged peaks of Glen Etive.  We had no need of hurry, we spent a good hour on the top.  In my capacity as quartermaster I produced my bonne bouche, two tins of orange juice.  Then we set off along the ridge at a steady easy pace.

Ten sentences in seven lines!  I like this sort of thing when Hoyle does it; however, I loathe the style (often seen in so-called "thrillers") which I call "jerky".  Perhaps the difference between Hoyle's staccato and the boredom of "jerky" is that Hoyle's narratives are pervaded with a connectivity of atmosphere, whereas the Jerkies don't do atmosphere.
    Anyhow, let's get on to long sentences.  
    Of course these can be boring and/or confusing - think Henry James - but they have an inherent advantage over the shorties: you can produce effects of rhythm which are just about impossible otherwise.  
    I'll give three examples.  The first - the most beautiful - is the least complex, structured mostly as a list.  It's from Clark Ashton Smith's The Demon of the Flower, in which he begins his wonderful description of the sinister blossoms of the planet Lophai:

Coiling and uncoiling in double dawns; tossing tumultuously under vast suns of jade green and balas-ruby orange; swaying and weltering in rich twilights, in aurora-curtained nights, they resembled fields of rooted serpents that dance eternally to an other-worldly music.

Now compare the above with something at the other end of the scale of complexity.  What follows (a passage consisting not of one but of two sentences, each aiming at the same concept) is from Walter Scott's The Fair Maid of Perth (1828).  Set in the tumultuous reign of Robert III (1390-1406), the novel at this point (page 258) relates how the citizens of Perth, enraged by the murder of one of their number, are nevertheless willing to wait for justice to be done by due process:

...To these delays the multitude submitted, with a patience and order which strongly marked the national character of a people, whose resentment had always been the more deeply dangerous, that they will, without relaxing their determination of vengeance, submit with patience to all delays which are necessary to ensure its attainment.  The multitude, therefore, received their magistrates with a loud cry, in which the thirst of revenge was announced, together with the deferential welcome to the patrons by whose direction they expected to obtain it in right and legal fashion.

My third example lies somewhere in between the first and second in the complexity-scale.  

...The things which the Stygian darkness hid from my objective eye could not have been half so wonderful as the pictures which my imagination wrought as it conjured to life again the ancient peoples of this dying world and set them once more to the labours, the intrigues, the mysteries and the cruelties which they had practised to make their last stand against the swarming hordes of the dead sea bottoms that had driven them step by step to the uttermost pinnacle of the world where they were now entrenched behind an impassable barrier of superstition. 

That, as you will doubtless have spotted straightaway is from The Gods of Mars (page 106 of my edition). 
    With all these examples my aim is to support a preference based on the view that, when competently written, long complex sentences draw the reader along a path with many linked viewpoints, seguing one smooth transition after another, so that, rather than waste mental fuel stopping and starting, the reader's attention benefits from the steady build-up of significance.
    In the third example, Edgar Rice Burroughs seems particularly daring stylistically (though I'm sure the daring wasn't conscious) in the breathless way he spouts the last 47 words of the sentence without a single stop for breath - i.e. with no punctuation at all.  It may seem amateurish to some critics but it's actually the perfect way to capture the fascination with which John Carter gazes at the painted Barsoomian scenes.
    A roller-coaster narrative with dramatic swerves but no disenchanting jerks!

2026 June 18th:

PERSIA AND MARS

I have been known to grumble about Leigh Brackett's excessively Celtic borrowing for some of her Martian names.  (Caer Dhu, indeed!  Rhiannon, indeed!  Didn't she realize how incongruous the associations were likely to be?)  
    Now, thanks to my learned contributor Lone Wolf (in an email of 26th May), I can, if I wish, geographically extend the grumbling on the same principle - but I shan't, because I'm not Persian and know no Persian.  Here's what LW says:

...in Lin Carter's Martian novels too, the language of the Martians is strongly reminiscent of Persian (especially in the manner of connecting words by the linking vowel “-i”, same as in the so-called “ezāfe” construction in Persian) and he even borrows directly some Persian words, although arbitrarily assigning to them different meanings (thus for instance the word “juhangir” that he takes to mean a Martian minstrel almost exactly copies the Persian name Jehāngīr – lit. “World-holder”, used also as epithet of kings and conquerors in poetry)...

All this might cause a twinge in the sensibilities of Iranian readers of Leigh Brackett's work, but for the rest of us, my guess is that Lin Carter has got away with it.

2026 June 12th:

SOUTH AMERICA AND MARS

A E Van Vogt in The First Martian and Walter M Miller in Crucifixus Etiam made memorable use of the theme that the natives of high-altitude regions in South America would be well-adapted to colonizing Mars.
    Then from an email which I received on 26 May, here are some further reflections on relations between Mars and the high plateau regions of the Andes, by Lone Wolf in scholarly researcher-mode:

...There is the rarefied air, the scarce vegetation, the canal irrigation system used by the ancient megalithic cultures in Bolivian Altiplano (which according to Jim Allen's hypothesis may have been the actual location of Plato's Atlantis), etc., that suggest a typical Old Martian landscape. So A. Hyatt Verrill in his satirical short story A Visit to Suari (Amazing Stories, July 1930), which describes the life on Earth from Martian perspective, uses Quechua words for the Martian names and terms (e.g. “Quilla” is the Moon, Mars is “Sonko-Huara”, meaning something like “Heart-Star”, “tuppi” is the Martian “mile”– actually an old Inca measure, the Martians have "Inkis"  as rulers and "Amautas", i.e. sages, etc.), and he even suggests that a lost Martian interplanetary expedition may have inspired the ancient Andean cultures – thus the Martian protagonist there sees a relief in some ruins on the Andean plateau (maybe those in Tiahuanaco?), which according to the author represents the image of a Martian (I wish I knew which relief exactly he had in mind, because he never describes how the Martians looked like themselves and only from the description of the manner in which the Earthlings appeared strange to them the reader can indirectly conclude that the Martians were somehow different from humans). So there definitely seems to exist in the fictional imagining of the alien cultures some unconscious association of the Atlantean archetype with Mars (as well as of the Lemurian archetype with Venus) and there are also authors (like Aleksey Tolstoy and Philip Francis Nowlan) who propose the opposite variant of the ancient Atlanteans migrating to Mars.

Commenting on the above, I would add that a sort of pristine science-fictional aura hangs about pre-Columbian American cultures, perhaps inevitably so, given that they developed so utterly independently of Eurasia and Africa.  And the fact that their Stone-Age technologies were combined with such advanced organizations has stunning implications for the "prehistory" of our own "Old World".  If only we had time-vision, as developed by the savants in Colin Wilson's The Philosopher's Stone, we might find ourselves heirs of stone-age cultures fully deserving of the term "civilization", and our prehistory would become history!

2026 June 9th:

MEA CULPA

Just starting a page devoted to the artists of the OSS, I thought I'd begin with a reference to Edward Ardizzone, thinking that he was the illustrator for Prisoners of Saturn.  But he wasn't!  All these years I have credited the wrong guy.  The actual artist was Harold Jones, as I ought to have found out by checking.  
    My only excuse, a poor one, is that my copy of the book does not mention the artist's name at all, with the result that I assumed it was Ardizzone, since the style reminds me strongly of his.
    I have now corrected the reference on the main Saturn page.  (The Prisoners of Saturn page did not have the error.)
    Both Edward Ardizzone and Harold Jones died before this website existed, but I apologize to their shades...

2026 May 24th:

NOTES ON THE CHRONOLOGY OF BRADBURY'S MARS

From researcher Lone Wolf:

...I came across a story by Ray Bradbury entitled “Dwellers in Silence” [Planet Stories, Spring 1949], which turned out to be the first publication of the story later included in The Martian Chronicles under the title “The Long Years”.
    One curious fact is the difference of the dates in it. In The Martian Chronicles (1950 edition) this story is dated “April 2026” (i.e. it should have happened last month in that particular time-line!). But in Dwellers in Silence it appears to be in 2017 (which can be derived from the mention that it is 20 years after 1997, when according to the text the Great War on Earth and the plague on Mars have happened).
    Thus if we assume the same relative chronology of the dates of the stories like that in the book, the first expeditions to Mars should have been in the years 1989 – 1991, although I doubt that this story was originally meant to be part of some continuity – we can see for instance that here the captain of the Earth ship is called Parsons and not Wilder from the Fourth Expedition, as it is in the book version (and anyway, I've always thought that the chronology set up for the book is a little too short – all the events of the four expeditions, the mass colonization of the planet and then the return to Earth when the war starts happen, in less than one decade!).
    But somehow those old dates feel more relevant to me, even if we think them to belong to some alternative time-line – all Bradbury's Martian stories have some old-time vibe and I can't imagine them happening in our era or even in our future (and as I learnt from the article in Wikipaedia, all the dates in the book in the later editions from 1990s on have been moved 31 years ahead, so now the whole sequence starts from 2030). Here are excerpts from the two versions for comparison:

It was the twentieth year after the Great War. Mars was a tomb planet. Whether or not Earth was the same was a matter for much silent debate for himself, or his family, on the long Martian nights.
    (…)
    “The four crosses were there, sir. The names were still on them. I wrote them down to be sure.” He produced a white paper and read from it. “Alice Hathaway, Marguerite, Susan and John Hathaway. All four died of the plague in July, 1997.”
    “Thank you, Williamson,” said Parsons. He closed his eyes.
    “Twenty years ago, sir,” said Williamson, his hands trembling. He was afraid to look up at the people at the table.
    “Yes, twenty years ago,” said Parsons.

(Dwellers in Silence)

It was the twentieth year after the Great War. Mars was a tomb planet. Whether or not Earth was the same was a matter for much silent debate for Hathaway and his family on the long nights.
    (…)
    "The four crosses were there, sir. The names were still on them. I wrote them down to be sure." He read from a white paper: "Alice, Marguerite, Susan, and John Hathaway. Died of unknown virus. July 2007."
    "Thank you, Williamson." Wilder closed his eyes.
    "Nineteen years ago, sir," Williamson's hand trembled.
    "Yes."

(The Martian Chronicles, 1950 edition: April 2026, "The Long Years"
 (or in the 1997 edition: April 2057))

2026 May 15th:

JOHN CARTER AND BARSOOM - MORE ABOUT THE MYSTERY

The debate has continued in further emails since those which I quoted in Telemorphs and Gustavus Pope. 
    What follows contains, in particular, one idea that struck me as tremendous, and I have emphasized it thus.

LW, 13th May:

...I was musing recently about Burroughs and his uncanny ability to describe improbable worlds and events without any explanations and still make it sound credible. Thus he never explains the origin of John Carter and the reason for his immortality (and one should think he would have a lot of memories about his life on Earth before going to Barsoom, but somehow this topic never comes up after the first novel). Maybe (and I am not sure here if this is my original idea or I've read it somewhere – I really can't remember, but I have the feeling that I've seen something similar in some online discussion) the author has intended that Carter turns out later to be originally from Mars – from that ancient extinct race of the white Martians who build the great cities in the time where there were still seas on the planet. Maybe they had sent an expedition which crashed on Earth and John Carter was the only survivor, who got amnesia from the shock, but later adapted to the life on the planet. There are in fact a lot of allusions in the text which seem as if intended to prepare the reader for such a revelation: for instance, he is often compared to the ancient white Martian race, he never misses an opportunity to emphasize his particular attraction to Mars and no other planet, etc.  But the moment never comes. I think Burroughs probably had some vague idea to use this later – maybe to make John Carter remember his true identity and use his ancient knowledge in order to save the planet – but he never came to that; either he decided against it for some reason, or simply forgot. He seems to be one of those writers who invent the story in the process of telling it and have only a vague notion about what will happen in the end. Thus he often concentrates on what I call “side adventures” – secondary plots in which the protagonist becomes involved while being deviated from some major quest (I actually find this rather annoying, because I wait for the story to return to the main theme, which often doesn't happen, but the “side adventure” becomes instead the main content of the particular book). Thus he wrote a lot of sequels or spin-offs of his sagas (the Martian, the Venusian, etc.), but never reached any real conclusion. In the case of the Barsoom cycle it is never explained how the main problem – containing the overpopulation of a small dying planet with limited resources by a virtually immortal species – was resolved when John Carter became supreme warlord and established world peace. Before there were the quasi-feudal civilization of constantly warring city-states and the suicidal cult of Issus which maintained the control over the population, but he removed all that. Maybe it was exactly here where his ancient knowledge from the long-forgotten era of the white Martians should have come in play (because they somehow managed to live on Barsoom once and even to create a higher civilization), but perhaps Burroughs himself couldn't come up with any solution to use in his fiction and that's why he kept postponing the conclusion of the story, and thus now we'll never now how it was originally meant to be...
    As for that book of J. J.Astor, I remember now that I also came across it, but I found it almost unreadable and later completely forgot it...  If I am not mistaken though, there was the interesting detail that Astor was using the same term “apergy” for the repulsive anti-gravitational force as in Across the Zodiac by Percy Greg.  Previously I'd always thought that the idea of anti-gravitation was rather modern (from the post-rocket era's SF) and I was surprised to find it as early as the 19th century.

Z, 14th May:

The idea that Carter was originally a Barsoomian is brilliant!  Much better than my own theory that he was an Atlantean.  I find it easy enough to adjust to the idea that the ancient seafaring Martians, who didn't invent flyers, nevertheless despatched one expedition to Jasoom - since Barsoom is full of mavericks and lone inventors; in fact all the inventors and savants seem to be loners - Ras Thavas, Fal Sivas, Phor Tak...  (No think-tanks or research institutes on Barsoom.  It's not their style.)
    I would dispute the idea that Carter as Warlord brought peace to Barsoom.  The evidence of the series contradicts that.  He seems to have created a fairly solid alliance of the sanest or most powerful states - Helium, Ptarth, Kaol, Duhor - by the series' end.  But the red Martians are too bellicose for world peace, and Carter himself is so fond of a scrap, it would only take one princess-kidnapping to set him off...
    However, the final story brings a threat from Sassoom, which maybe, just maybe, might get the red men to sink their differences for a while.  Who knows.  If only one could get ERB to finish his work via Ouija bord.
    I doubt whether anyone else other than ERB could finish the series.  No other writer can convincingly combine his qualities of ramshackle semi-consistency and the sort of lanky, beguiling sentence-structure which I've not met in any other writer.
    Having said all this, the idea that Carter was a Barsoomian doesn't dispense with the need for parallel evolutions, since we still have Ulysses Paxton's marriage to Valla Dia - for which they both need to be human.  

LW, 15 May 2026:

In this regard I've been wondering about Ulysses Paxton too – did he also become immortal? But that is not clear from the books. And John Carter didn't become immortal when he came to Barsoom, but he was such from the start (he says that he doesn't remember any youth or beginning of his life on Earth, although Burroughs never returns to this topic and leaves it without explanation). At first I thought that maybe this was some effect from his living on Mars and thus becoming like the Martians or that it was an inherent quality of his astral double in which he goes there, but it doesn't seem likely that all Martians live in astral bodies too – they appear material enough and they doesn't astral-project themselves between planets, only John Carter does so and this only between Earth and Mars, being attracted particularly to the latter probably only because he once came from there, and back because his original body still remains on Earth (it can be argued, of course, that he is strong as an Earthman and so able to do his miraculous jumps and stunts on Mars, but maybe that's because he has developed stronger muscles while adapting himself to the stronger terrestrial gravity during his age-long life on the planet).  And then Burroughs doesn't seem to understand this astral body as composed of some subtle matter, as do the theosophists and other occult writers, but something more like those doppelgangers which great mystics and yogis are believed to be able to produce as if “copying” themselves, permitting them to be in many places simultaneously. Which leads me to another thought – could Barsoom actually exist in a slightly different phase of reality, where the doppelganger also appears? (and I don't mean here the “astral plane” of the occultists, but a different aspect of the same reality, maybe even one of many which intersect in the same planet – something like the parallel world of Thomahlia in the novel The Blind Spot of Homer Eon Flindt, which is still Earth, but corresponding to another section of the ether vibrational spectrum).
    This can be another ontological justification of the OSS – that we do not perceive directly the external world, but only its re-presentation, which is a reconstruction made by our brain on the base of the impressions, received by our sensory apparatus, filtered through our cultural paradigm, thus being only a small section even of the abstraction made by our senses. Then maybe the higher principles of our organism (like soul, spirit, etc.) have access to the total reality, but we perceive in our consciousness only that phase (or section of it) to which our mind is culturally tuned and thus currently we “see” the other planets through the “eyes” of our probes.  These are machines made of dead non-organic matter.  Even if they are controlled by advanced software, they are still not complex enough to be able to harbour higher principles (or “souls” of their own), and so, being naturally tuned to the “dead” phase of reality and interacting only with that, they show us dead worlds. But the astronomers of the previous ages even with their much less perfect equipment were living persons and thus perhaps able to glimpse sometimes into the other phases, and maybe this is how such “illusions” appeared like the canals on Mars as seen by Lowell and other observers or the surface of Venus with its two circumpolar continents and seven equatorial seas between them as mapped by Bianchini.  

Z, 15th May:

That is a another huge idea I had not thought of - that we see only that version of the Solar System to which we are culturally attuned.  It has immense possibilities.  For example, one might imagine a campaign to readjust the attunement, so as to create or re-create the Solar System one wants to have!  
    By the way, regarding John Carter's travels between Earth and Barsoom: Richard A Lupoff in his critical study of Barsoom theorizes that the astral journeys are between one continuum and another; thus, if a native Barsoomian were to try the trip in reverse in the same way, he wouldn't reach our Earth - instead he'd reach Jasoom, which is Earth's aspect in a different continuum.  Similarly if the spaceship in The Moon Maid had succeeded in reaching the fourth planet it would have found not Barsoom but simply Mars.  You can't reach across dimensions by spaceship: you can only do it by doing what John Carter did - whatever that deed may have entailed.
    As to whether Paxton becomes immortal: maybe there's indeed something in the air of Barsoom that prevents Earth-style ageing.  (For doubtless a different reason to the anti-ageing effects of life in Pellucidar.)  Of course, even Barsoomians eventually age, if they survive long enough - as did Ras Thavas, which is why he had to have his brain transplanted...

2026 May 13th:

REACHING OUT FOR STELLAR INFLUENCERS

Here's a suggested plot-brew:
    Take the following ingredients:
    - the weird "Douglas-Ouyang planets" in Cordwainer Smith's Under Old Earth;
    - the idea of suns possessing consciousness in Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker;
    Mix together to form the theme for a story in which the OSS is contacted remotely by exoplanet or exosolarian influencers, and then:
    - add the following candidate influencer, for which I quote from Sue French writing in the May 2008 issue of Sky & Telescope:

    ...the fascinating binary star W Ursae Majoris, just 162 light-years away.  Its components are so close together that they're pulled into teardrop shapes that actually touch!  Both stars are yellow dwarfs, one a bit larger than our Sun and the other a little smaller.  The conjoined stars whirl madly around each other every 8 hours...    

I'd recommend, as in the Smith tale, that the influence be defeated; but, on the way, there'd be room for fine shenanigans.  An ideal motive, in fact, for some maverick culture to create an off-the-beaten-track mystery on an OSS world.
    After all, just think for a moment about that crazy phenomenon: a pair of stars actually conjoined in a whirling cosmic dance!  A Martian savant who tuned into that - well, I leave it to your imagination what he might do.
                                                                 >>  Tales Unwritten

2026 May 12th:

TELEMORPHS AND GUSTAVUS POPE

Had an exchange of emails with Lone Wolf this morning.

The starting point was my remark at the end of our notes to the latest Guess The World answer (see Steamy Seas and Saurians on Saturn):  "Strange how these old writers didn't hesitate to use words for Terran species when describing life on other worlds." 

LW responds:

If I remember correctly Gustavus W. Pope did the same thing while describing Mars and Venus in his two "Romances of the Planets", published in America around the same time (1894 and 1895). I remember also him describing some palace on Mars decorated with sculptures of classic mythologic figures like Nereids and Tritons with tridents riding seahorses etc. (not just similar figures named so metaphorically, but, as I understood, practically identical with their Terrestrial equivalents, which coincidence he was explaining as a result of parallel cultural developments). His samples of the Martian language were also taken from Sanskrit and ancient Greek in a curious mixture, but he doesn't mention this at all and his characters somehow never notice it. And it is not that he implies some common origin or interplanetary contacts in the past - Earthlings, Martians and "Plutonians" (as he calls the inhabitants of the destroyed asteroid progenitor planet) in his novels are humans that somehow evolved the same way on different worlds with only minor variations in skin colour and stature. And while it may be speculated that given the similar conditions on each planet the intelligent species would teleologically evolve along the same lines in more or less humanoid form, if this identity were to extend as far as repeating the same forms in their culture, arts and language, the universe would be a rather boring place (even only in our own planet we have more diversity than that).

My response:

Quite so - it would indeed be boring.  The ideal for me is Burroughs' and C S Lewis' "telemorphs" - my term for independently-evolved humans on other worlds - which are human but culturally original. 
    It should be possible to invent some OSS-style pseudoscientific blah to explain the biological similarity.  For example: solar radiation, common to all System worlds, might contain within it an unsuspected blueprint for parallel evolution towards humanity (though not towards other organisms).  As for why it should work for humans alone and not (say) for elephants, well, it may be something to do with a future community of intellects influencing the past... blah, blah.

2026 May 7th:

SUB-MOONS: AN OVERLOOKED RESOURCE

Not a long entry, this, but something to mention in passing: it's rare, very rare, to find a tale that refers to a natural satellite of a satellite.  I can only think of two examples.
    One is the moon of Triton (if I remember correctly) that is mentioned in Piers Anthony's Macroscope (1969), which is not to any appreciable extent an OSS novel.
    The other, earlier one is the moon of Callisto which is the scene for John Wyndham's definitely OSS tale Dumb Martian (Galaxy, July 1952): an unforgettable drama in which a slave gets the better of her master.  The setting, isolated and grim, intensifies the tension between the two main characters.

    ...Jupiter IV/II was, by definition, a sub-moon, and probably a captured asteroid.  The surface was not cratered, like Luna's: it was simply a waste of jagged, riven rocks.  The satellite as a while had the form of an irregular ovoid; it was a bleak, cheerless lump of stone splintered off some vanished planet, with nothing whatever to commend it but its situation.
    There have to be way-load stations...       

That description would fit a current hard-sf narrative very well, with no OSS element whatsoever; but of course Mars in the story is inhabited, by people whom the male protagonist, Duncan Weaver, despises - to his cost.

2026 April 29th:

ECCENTRIC OLD TOMES

Ace researcher Lone Wolf has uncovered a trove of occultist material which we OSS fans might put to our own uses, in the business of recruiting further accretions to our cherished world-gestalts.   Here, then, are three passages to read (or skim-read if, as with me, your tolerance of New-Agey waffle is low), from writers describing weird evolutionary sequences which put me in mind of ERB's Caprona - The Land That Time Forgot.  From our perspective the old occultists might be said to have built better than they knew (and after all, isn't that also true of many mainstream classic SF authors?  They didn't know what they were really doing.  Otherwise they would have done more of it).  

[1]  From Annie Besant's Theosophy (1912):

...a series of six globes composed of the matter of the spheres of varying densities is formed in connection with each planet — seven globes, including the planet. Such a series is called a Chain, and during its period of evolution it passes through seven stages, or lives ; there is thus a succession of seven Chains, and this complete series is termed a Scheme of Evolution, and is under the charge of a mighty spiritual Intelligence, called by Theosophists a ‘‘Ruler of seven Chains”. There are ten of these in our Solar System, but only seven are in manifestation, ruled by the “seven Spirits before the throne of God”, mentioned in the “Revelation of S. John”. They are at different stages of evolution, marked' by the sphere of matter in which their lowest, globes exist. Thus the Neptunian and the Terrene Chains have each three globes in the physical sphere, for these are both at their deepest point of descent into matter, in their middle, or fourth, life. The seven globes of the Earth Chain include Mars, the Earth, and Mercury; those of the Neptunian, Neptune and his two satellites.

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.274520/page/n82/mode/1up

[2] From L. P. Gratacap, The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars, Being the Posthumous Papers of Bradford Torrey Dodd edited by L. P. Gratacap (1903):

My father had an interesting habit of snapping his fingers on both hands together over his head when he declaimed in this way, always circling about the room in a rapid stride. I remember he stopped in front of me and continued in a strain something like this:

"For myself I am convinced that there has been an evolution in the order of beings from one planet to another, that there is going on a stream of transference, from one plane of life here to planes elsewhere, and that the stream is pouring in as well as out of this world, and that it may be, in our case, pouring both ways, that is, we may be losing individuals into lower grades of life as well as emitting them to higher. See, what economy!

"Instead of wasting the energies of imagination to account for the destinations of millions upon millions of human beings, the countless host that has occupied the surfaces of this earth through all the historic and prehistoric ages, we can, upon this assumption, reduce the number of individuals immensely, allowing that spirits are constantly arriving, constantly departing, and that the sum total in the solar system remains perhaps nearly fixed, just as in the electrolysis of water we have hydrogen rising at one electrode and oxygen at the other by transmission of atoms of hydrogen and atoms of oxygen toward each electrode through the water itself, in opposite directions, while for a sensible time the mass of water remains unchanged.

"Let us suppose that in Mercury some form of mental life exists, that it is individualized, that it expresses the physical constants of that globe, that its mentality has reached the point where it can make use of the resources of Mercury, can respond to its physical constants so far as they awaken poetry or art or religion or science. Suppose that this life is one of extreme forcefulness, of stress and storm, like some prehistoric condition on our globe, but invested with more intellectual attributes than the same ages on our earth required or possessed, perhaps reaching a permanent condition not unlike that depicted in the Niebelungen Lied or the Sagas of the North. It might be called the brawn period. Then the spirits born upon our planet or on any other planet in an identical condition, would find after death their destination in Mercury, where they could evolve up to the point where they might return to as, or to some other planet fitted for a higher life.

"Then Venus, we may imagine, succeeding Mercury, carries a higher type, an emotional life, though of course I am not influenced by her accidental name, in suggesting it. Here in Venus, a period perchance resembling a mixture of the pagan Grecian life and the troubadour life of Provence may prevail and again to it have flown the spirits which in our planet only touch that development, which from Venus flow to us, those adapted for the religious or intellectual phase we present. This Venus life might be called the sense period.

"And now our world follows, with its scientific life which probably represents its normal limit. Beyond this it will not go. As we have developed through a brawn and sense period to our present stage, so in Mercury and Venus, ages have prevailed of development which eventuated in their final fixed stages at brawn and sense. In Venus, too, the brawn stage preceded the sense period. In us both have preceded the scientific stage. There has been, may we not think, constant interchanges between these planets of such lives as survive material dissolution, and they have found the nidus that fits them in each. Souls leaving us in a brawn epoch have fled to Mercury, souls leaving us in a sense epoch have fled to Venus, and all souls in Mercury or Venus, ready for reincarnation in a scientific epoch, have come to us.

"But there is an important postulate underlying this theory. It is, that upon each planet the possibilities of development just attain to the margin of the next higher step in mental evolution. That is, that on Mercury the period of brawn develops to the possibility of the period of sense without fully exemplifying it, so in Venus the period of sense develops to the possibility of the period of science without attaining it, and in our world the period of science develops to the period of spirit, without, in any universal way, exhibiting it.

"These are steps progressively represented, I may imagine, in the planets. And, in the further progress outward, we reach the planet Mars. Let us place here the period of spirit. On Mars is accomplished in society, and accompanied by an accomplishment in its physical features, also, of those ideals of living which the great and good unceasingly labor to secure for us here and unceasingly fail to secure. O my child, if we could learn somehow to get tidings from that distant sphere, if only the viewless abyss of space between our world and Mars might be bridged by the noiseless and unseen waves of a magnetic current."

[3] From Aleister Crowley, Liber LI. The Lost Continent: 

It was the most ancient tradition of the Atlantean Magicians that they were the survivors of a race inhabiting a country called Lemuria, of which the South Pacific archipelago may be the remains. These Lemurians had, they held, built up a civilization equal, if not superior to their own; but through a misunderstanding of magical law — some said the 2nd, some the 8th, some the 23rd — had involved themselves and their land in ruin. Others thought that the Lemurians had succeeded in their magical task, and broken their temple. In any case, it was the secret Lemurian tradition that they themselves represented the survivals of a yet earlier race who lived on ice, and they of yet another who lived in fire, and they again of earlier colonists from Mars. The theory, in fine, was that the aim of man is to attain the Sun, whence, according to one school of cosmology, he was exiled in the cosmic catastrophe which resulted in the formation of Neptune. His task on any given planet was therefore to overturn the laws of Nature on that planet, thus mastering it sufficiently to enable him to make the leap to the next planet inward. Exactly how and in what sense the leap was made remains obscure, even to the heirs of Atlantis.

Lone Wolf adds: 
...not sure whether Crowley actually believed all this or whether it was just an invented background detail of his curious “novel”.
    The next logical step was the “attaining of Venus”, as Crowley designates the spiritual goal of the Atlanteans to which were dedicated all the efforts of their civilization ending with the artificially induced destruction of their islands, that probably was the way of mass transmigration to the that next planet. But it is curious that in this excerpt he says “colonists from Mars” for the original humans who came to Earth as if speaking about a physical travel and not just interplanetary reincarnation.

Comment from Zendexor:
"Attaining the Sun" sounds interesting.  Maybe as disembodied spirits who don't mind the heat, or as neutronium-bodied Solarians (vide Hal Clement's Proof)?

2026 April 26th:

LUCKY GUESSES ABOUT MOONS

Many of you have doubtless heard of Jonathan Swift's amazing fictional idea, way back in the early eighteenth century, that Mars has two moons - amazing because it turned out to be true when Phobos and Deimos were discovered in 1877.
    Today in an email from Lone Wolf I learn of a similar "lucky guess".  Apparently the theosophist, Annie Besant, asserted back in 1912 that Neptune had two moons.  This was many years before the discovery in 1949 of Neptune's actual second satellite, Nereid.
    In my view Besant's "clairvoyance" is less amazing than Swift's, because Voyager 2 went on to discover six more Neptunian moons, putting an end to the period in which the known Neptunian total stood at two, whereas Mars' total of two hasn't changed and so even today reflects what was said in Gulliver's Travels.
    Nevertheless, the 1912 assertion about the Neptune system is startling; perhaps especially for an oldster like me, who remembers having learned about the Solar System from texts that were printed long before Voyager.  What value, if any, can we ascribe to such guesses?
    My view inclines towards that of Lone Wolf, who in the same email remarked:

....Scientists, of course, would have dismissed the topic as fabrication or coincidence and even the believers in theosophy today don't take those old writings of Leadbeater and Besant seriously knowing the astronomical facts in them to be untrue; they try to sweep them under the rug as unorthodox deviations from the doctrine by quoting their denouncing by H. P. Blavatsky as “misunderstanding of the statements in some of the messages of the Mahatmas”.  But those are not just theoretical speculations they write about, but visions reported as results of “clairvoyant research”. How then came they into being in the first place? I think even fantasies and fabrications should have some explanation and not be excluded from study just because of their apparent “unreality”. The psychological theories of C. G. Jung about the collective unconscious and its archetypes in his study of myths and symbols was probably the first step and our speculations about the alternative realities contained in the noosphere could probably get us further in that direction.

Anyhow, one is tempted to add the wish that Miss Besant was right when she said that "Neptune and his two satellites" were habitable!  

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