the sunport vista:
zendexor's
oss
diary

2026

The Samuel Pepys of the OSS...

Zendexor on 72nd birthday, 20 Jan 2026, in front of even older castle, plus incongruously modern van. (See the entry for January 20th.)

WINTER BLUES ON SATURN

On page 35 of the Astronomy Now publication, Saturn: Exploring the Ringed Planet (2015), is a picture with the caption: 

Winter is coming.  Taken by Cassini on 29 July 2013, this view of Saturn shows the planet's southern polar region, growing blue as winter approaches and temperatures plunge to -172 degrees Celsius, while the north enjoys summer, such as it is...   

I tried scanning it but the colours don't come out at all well.  I found a better one online, and have posted it here.  You can see the contrasting seasonal colours in the two hemispheres. 
    Now, this to me is a striking example of a possible "OSS echo".  It's almost inviting an author to write a tale of the Captain Future variety in which a habitable Saturn has cloud-tops which look bluer in winter!
    It's as though poor old reality makes occasional halting steps towards an imitation of picturesque fiction.  In my view it's worth keeping an eye out for such correspondences between the dreamlike and the actual, even if their relations with the real are as tenuous as they are here.
    After all, we live in a rather retarded, special-needs solar system, and when, every now and then, it does seem to dodder in the right direction, we ought to show we appreciate the effort...

DOWN WITH MISSION CONTROL

In a recent exchange of emails with the anomymous researcher "Lone Wolf" who contributes so many Guess The World scenes to this site, I found these remarks of his quite irresistible: 

The “happy-go-lucky exploration”, as you call it, is my favourite type of those old time interplanetary adventure stories, especially when it is about secret inventions of private researchers, which made possible travels to other worlds of single individuals or at the most – small groups of private persons, that remain unknown or hidden from the general public (such as H.G. Wells' First Men in the Moon, G.P. Serviss' A Columbus of Space, G. Griffith's A Honeymoon in Space, C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet or J.W. Campbell's stories about Blake and Penton, etc.), – stories that are without fanfares and glory or pompous heroic stuff about expeditions seen and celebrated from all the world, not to mention such modern things like telemetry and other practices that expose the person to total monitoring by the “mission control”, deprive him of any privacy and make him more a machine or instrument than a man. That's why the old kind of secret adventures, which happen as if in a private world, have always had a special fascination for me...

Me too...  though I also like the nostalgia of more public fictional enterprises in the old space program.  And granted, of course, that in real life the crew of Apollo 13 (to take the most obvious example) had every reason to be grateful to Mission Control...  
    Of course, both in fiction and in real life, the further from Earth people go, the less there can be a "mission control" in any close or immediate sense - unless someone discovers a way to beat the light-speed in communications! 
    Another point in favour of adventure is the sheer number of possiblle destinations.  Even if the Solar System were to fall under a tyranny, it's hard to believe that every landscape of every world and planetoid could possibly be under regular surveillance.  Even if everything could in principle be monitored, how could the monitors keep up?  

DARE-DEVIL WORLD-BUILDING

A phrase which has stayed in my mind over the decades is, "a more practical civilization".  Not, you might think, a resonantly romantic or adventurous idea.  Yet it has impressed me for over half a century.
    Here is the long sentence in which it occurs:
    ...During the ages of hardships and incessant warring between their own various races, as well as with the green men, and before they had fitted themselves to the changed conditions, much of the high civilization and many of the arts of the fair-haired Martians had become lost; but the red race of today has reached a point where it feels that it has made up in new discoveries and in a more practical civilization for all that lies irretrievably buried with the ancient Barsoomians beneath the countless intervening ages.
    This excerpt from chapter XI of A Princess of Mars (note the magnificent sentence structure) might prompt the retort, "Are you sure, Mr Burroughs, that the modern culture of the red men of Barsoom is all that practical?  If they were practical wouldn't they have surveyed their planet properly by now - they've had long enough in which to do it - so that it wouldn't be left till recently to discover the kaldanes, for example, or the Panars, or the secret valley of Kamtol?  And is it practical to have a political system which allows a jeddak like Tul Axtar to rule untrammelled?  And what about space travel - if Gar Nal and Fal Sivas can both build spacecraft, why hasn't it caught on before now?"
    A fair enough demur, but it misses the point I'm aiming at.  Still, first, regarding inconsistencies - 
    Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote so much, I reckon it's a fair guess that he wrote at speed, and without a lot of hesitation or planning.  This meant some inconsistency was bound to creep in, but, on the other hand, spontaneity had the good effect that what poured up through the channel of his imagination was allowed to flow free, without those rationalisations that can kill the immediacy of the vision.  (And of course it's a darned good thing, from the plotting point of view, that the Barsoomians hadn't carried out any exhaustive planetary surveys.)
    A consequence of this ad hoc spontaneous approach was that the author could successfully take a risk without even knowing that he was doing so, like a daredevil teenager showing off his bike-riding skills instinctively for the sheer heck of it without even bothering to boast "Look, no hands!"  And this is where the "practical civilization" remark comes in.
    Barsoom, wonderfully, is not a decline-scenario, despite the fact the world is slowing dying through the leakage of its atmosphere.  Burroughs, in making it clear that that the red men's culture is healthily vibrant, confident and creative, is thus daring to forgo all the narrative advantages of (for example) the Brackett Mars, which is culturally as well as physically on the wane.  "Look, no hands!"  The equivalent here being, "Look, I can make my tale picturesque without resorting to the autumnal tints of declinism!"
    And the reward for dispensing with those autumn tints - which though pretty do tend to accumulate an atmosphere of gloom - is the creation of a unique version of sword-and-planet Mars: the only one, so far as I know, that so successfully embodies exuberant adventure.

CONSPIRACIES GALORE

My mysterious pen-friend and anonymous researcher Lone Wolf has sent me links to a couple of tales by Ben Bova, a post-OSS author whom I haven't much read or enjoyed - I read one of his blockbusters and gave it back to the shop -  but who evidently can delight me, as I hope these little gems delight you; here are links to them:

Conspiracy Theory 

and

  The Great Moon Hoax, or A Princess of Mars.

    Playful explorations, these, of the theme which John Greer treated so successfully, and rather more seriously, in Out of the Chattering Planet - namely, that the old ideas of an inhabited Solar System were true, and that the modern probe results which seem to disprove them are spurious.
    Playful, yes, but lending a frisson of wonder to those readers who might in some circumstances be tempted to believe...
    In Greer's version [spoiler alert], the deception is carried out by the Martians themselves, who reverse-engineer the Terran probes so as to transmit false data back to us.  In the Bova versions, although the motive comes from the Martians the execution of the plot is controlled by authorities on Earth, who agree that the Red Planet ought to be left untouched for a while.
    I would add that you could have another version of the conspiracy:
    How about bringing in all the ludicrous claims that the Apollo landings were faked?  A story might be composed in which it's suggested that those who accuse the authorities of this cover-up are actually themselves conspiring: it is these private organizations, not governments, who are in league with the Martians who wish to discredit Terran attempts at space travel.  I suppose the reverse-engineering theme would have to be abandoned - but the Martians might be invisible, or something...  I don't know; you work it out.

A HANDY EXCUSE

Often have I stressed the point that OSS literature is full of "nods" to science; perfunctory-but-essential references made in order to keep up the bare, vital minimum suspension of disbelief.  The "nods" are what keeps "science fantasy" from being, simply, "fantasy".  They are, in a sense, incantations; they "cast the spell of science" (paradoxical though this sounds) in the form of mood. 
    It's the mood that's convincing, not the science, and yet - if psychology is a science, perhaps it is in a way scientific after all!
    Now, see if you can spot what struck me as the important "nod" in the following passage.

Something in the very name of Pluto; something in the thought of this forlorn ninth member of the Solar System took an irresistible hold upon his imagination, and for days he seemed able to talk about little else. “Think of this strange, strange world!” he would exclaim, while slowly he would pace up and down the room and stroke his chin as though weighing some momentous problem. “Think of it a billion miles or so beyond Neptune, a globe perhaps no larger than the earth, lost in the blackness of the outer void, its years longer than our centuries, its seasons longer than our lives! What stories it would be able to tell! Are there any living creatures there? Were any living beings ever able to endure the terror of its sunless,
frozen plains? Would we find the imprint of lost races upon its shores?—races that flourished while the planet was heated from within, but that have long ago fallen in the struggle with the cold?
    “Just consider, Dan!—consider the scientific value of exploring such a world. May not its geological strata hold the secret of evolution? yes, the secret of the evolution of the universe? May we not, after journeying there, be able to propound a new nebular hypothesis? May we not even
have won the key to the Ultimate?”

- Stanton A Coblentz, Into Plutonian Depths (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Spring 1931)

You saw it, didn't you?  I'm sure you did: it's the handy assumption that any frozen world enjoyed an early period when it was heated from within, and could thus have been habitable.
    Never mind the question, whether there could have been enough time, way out at Pluto's distance, for life to evolve while the planet had not yet completed its cooling.  "Nods", that's to say OSS-style-scientific-mood-excuses, are immune to quantification.
    That's how they work, and even reputedly hard-science-sf authors take advantage of the principle now and then.  Consider the following couple of masterpieces, each a favourite of mine: Arthur C Clarke in The City and the Stars has Earth's last city, Diaspar, existing a billion years in the future, despite the scientific consensus that the Sun by that time will have heated up enough to make Earth uninhabitable (current thinking gives us only about 500 million years); and even more strikingly, Fred Hoyle in Fifth Planet has a star brighter than the Sun approach close to our Solar System in the year 2087, close enough for its planets to be reachable by interplanetary rocket, despite the obvious fact that such an intruder would have been spotted long before now as an already brilliant light in the sky.
    In the case of Coblentz's theme, the pay-off is potentially immense.  Think of all those ice-worlds in the outer Solar System, now open to fictional exploitation by means of the "nod" in the above passage; think of the secrets they hold, or will hold once you fictioneers get going... 

THE POWER OF BLANK

Here's a riddle for you: what is the connection between Lancaster Castle and the fictional Solar System? 
    You may suspect that I'm just going to make the vague point that all big things are linked; that the sort of person who likes reading history will also have a big enough imagination to like to rove in the immensities of fictional space.   
    All that is true enough, but isn't quite what I have in mind to talk about today.
    I'm serious about the riddle.  Can you connect a medieval castle and the OSS?
    Read on...
    Today I attained the age of 72, and my wife Mary took me out to our local historic town for an expenses-paid browse amongst Astronomy magazines and books, before our return home for a special meal.  It's always pleasant to visit Lancaster, only a few miles by train or bus from our home in Heysham, and this time as we took the train we passed the Castle on our way from the station to the town centre.
    Lancaster Castle is medieval, but lacks the drama of a violent medieval history (unless you count executions), though later it was attacked more than once in the 1640s during the Civil War.  Its record therefore doesn't match that of Carlisle Castle 66 miles to the north, which can boast of having repelled an attack by Robert the Bruce in person in 1315.  Mostly, I suspect, Lancaster was too strong to acquire such renown; enemies took a look at it and decided not to bother... 
    Might we even conclude that a really impregnable, totally effective castle would have no history at all?  It would keep the peace and protect the people, allowing authors to live in safe conditions where they could create their own histories... 
    And what about an empty-of-life Solar System?  Need we grumble, as I often do, about how it has failed to live up to fiction?  Or - 
    Could we say that its blankness is all the more effective as an imagination-trap, like fly-paper, attracting an infinity of ideas by that very barrenness which invites authors to fill it?