the sunport vista:
zendexor's
oss
diary

2026

The Samuel Pepys of the OSS...

Birthday boy Zendexor at 72 in front of the even older Lancaster Castle with an incongruously modern van to the right

INVENTING NAMES: THE ORIGIN OF MURASH MONN

It happened like this (about a week ago).
    Background: my wife and I share the household tasks as follows: she sees to the dusting, ironing, hoovering and gardening, and the keeping of accounts, all of them actions she wishes done to a high standard; I take care of the stuff that a moron could do - loading and unloading of the dishwasher and washing machines, hanging out clothes to dry and taking them in, and the regular daily shopping.
    It happened that she asked if the next clothes-wash could be a "lights-wash" - a lot of her things are light in colour.  So I made a note to remind myself to do a Mary-wash on Monday: 
    "M-wash Mon."
    My handwrighting is usually quite clear, as I'm finicky about it, but this time "M-wash" came out looking like "Murash".
    Never let such a chance go to waste!
    Murash Monn now joins the crowd of names waiting to be attached to people on the planet Ooranye.

CAN A CREATIVE FOCUS ENLARGE THE REAL?

Further email correspondence with researcher Lone Wolf, concerning material he sent to me about the claims to knowledge of life on our neighbouring worlds asserted by Charles Leadbeater in The Inner Life (1911), leads me to follow on from my previous Diary entry, Migration to Mercury.
    In that entry a week ago I remarked on the mystery of how the heck did this Leadbeater fellow, and others of his sort, get to be so certain about their claims.    
    After all, it's one thing to let one's imagination rip in writing OSS fiction; it's quite something else to assert it as fact! 
    In my view it would be facile to dismiss these theosophists as liars.  The Inner Life doesn't have the ring of deliberate falsehood; it's hard to read that sort of stuff without concluding that the author believed what he was saying.  (I get the same impression and the same problem from current New Agey stuff about channelling Atlantis, etc.) 
    I mentioned this quandary to Lone Wolf.  
    His reply has really and truly got me thinking:
    Might creative ideas, as he suggests, clump together to form a collective memory which overspreads the boundary between subjective and objective, to enlarge the domain of what counts as real?
    Might the "reality engineering" theme I use in Uranian Thule become, some day, true?
    Here are Lone Wolf's words (I've put the central point in bold) plus an earlier email in which he provides an online link to the 1911 book:

[email, 12 April 2026]

I've been wondering about the same thing. It doesn't seem to me that this could have been a deliberate hoax – I mean that Leadbeater probably believed himself in what he was writing about Mars, otherwise why would he jeopardize the credibility of all the other things in his book? And it could be easily seen by anyone who has read the novel of Percy Greg [Across the Zodiac (1880)] that he simply summarizes his description of the Martians (up to their appearance, clothes, houses of coloured glass, artificial language, speech-recording machines, electrical technology, autocratic social structure, materialistic beliefs and secret occult order, etc.), but only putting them within a more modern (for his time) astronomical depiction of the planet – that of a Lowell-type Mars. That's why I was speculating that he has read that novel too and maybe even forgotten it, but the images from it have emerged from his subconscious mind into his visions. I don't know what kind of procedure the theosophists have used for their “astral projections”, but I guess it was something that induces a self-hypnotic trance like lucid dream or shamanic experience. In such state the smallest suggestion could serve as a seed for the creation of a whole imaginary world, maybe even maintained independently from the individual brain in the collective subconscious where other persons could experience it too and thus confirm it as “real” (I've read descriptions of such rituals among the primitive tribes in which a shaman could supposedly share his experience in a state of collective trance and take the whole group of participants in his visionary quests to the invisible worlds of the spirits). Hence came my hypothesis about the cosmic memory of the planetary noosphere, in which all mental experiences, including phantasies and dreams, are collected, maintained and even developed by an active collective subconscious. Thus all fantastic worlds from the novels could exist “objectively” out there and they could be experienced not only in imagination, but first hand, as “real”, if only one can “tune” his mind and perceptions to them. Then if we add to this the modern ideas about multiverse and parallel realities, the very notion of “reality” may become relative and one can wonder whether there is actual difference between the creative imagination of a writer and the “channelling” of a psychic medium. Maybe then the difference between reality and imagination, the external sensual experience and the internal mental experience, is just a matter of habitual focus of the conscious mind (but acquired on a subconscious level!) upon this or that possible world, unconditionally and unconsciously accepting the basic premises which define it. If we could learn how to change this by will we would probably be able to wander to different possible worlds, becoming a kind of “psychonauts” and a whole new science of “psychonautics” could be developed.

As for the idea about migration and reincarnation to other planets, I first thought it was rather extravagant, but it turned out that it was quite popular once among the spiritist and spiritualist circles a century or so ago, as I learned from the book of Theodor Flournoy about the Swiss medium Madame Helene Smith (who supposedly communicated with a person reincarnated on Mars and also produced descriptions and paintings of the Martian life and even texts in Martian language and its scripture). There seems to have been different theories among the spiritualists, some of them used also in the fantastic literature, about that to which planets we would go and from where we may have come. I know that Lovecraft was familiar with the theosophist writings and maybe therefrom he took that notion about Mercury as a future abode of life. I remember also Aleister Crowley writing in his rather obscure book The Lost Continent (which was supposed to be something like a satirical fantastic novel) that the ancient Atlanteans inherited from their Lemurian ancestors the belief that life goes from planet to planet starting from Neptune in direction to the Sun, from where once it was exiled, thus coming to Earth from Mars, while the next immediate spiritual goal being Venus. But then there is the opposite opinion expressed in the book Melbourne and Mars (1889) by Joseph Frazer (about each I have written once before, I think) – he describes an utopian society on Mars, where more evolved souls incarnate, including such from Earth, while those who have not yet reached that state, but are more developed than the other Earthlings, could be living on both planets in different bodies simultaneously, as do the protagonist of that novel. Then I also came across another book by some author from New Zealand (L.P. Gratacap, The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars, 1903), who develops a whole theory about the souls evolving while incarnating consecutively from planet to planet in direction away from the Sun – thus, if I remember correctly, according to him Mercury was a place of physical development, Venus – of aesthetical, Earth – of rational and Mars – of spiritual...

[Note re Mars and link to theosophist text in previous email from Lone Wolf, 7th April 2026:]

 I finally found again that text of Charles Leadbeater, in which he describes his “clairvoyant research” of the planet Mars and its inhabitants – it was in Vol. II of his book The Inner Life from the 1911 edition:

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.152110/page/n409/mode/1up

I read it during my first university studies back in the 1980s...  The description of the Martian civilization, culture and society is like a resume of that in Percy Greg's book Across the Zodiac (1880). The only thing that Leadbeater adds is the notion of the canals (in Greg's book there are no canals yet, but the old Mars with open seas and continents from the Dawes-Proctor's maps)... Obviously according to Leadbeater Mars and Mercury are part of the so-called “planetary chain” of the Earth, as in theosophy is called the circle of seven planets through which the “wave of life” (a great multitude of monads reincarnating en masse) passes consecutively in its evolution over enormous periods of time. Thus Mars has been before Earth the abode of our transmigrating souls in some very distant past, while the Mercury should be such in the future, when the Earth will no longer be inhabitable, passing itself into “obscuration”. Later though, Madame H.P. Blavatsky criticized this notion calling it a misconception – according to her the physical planets are each one the middle, visible members of their respective planetary chains, while the other six members (3 on the descending and 3 on the ascending arc) are located on the subtler planes of existence (astral, mental and causal), thus being invisible. So this chapter of Leadbeater's book was removed from its later editions.

MIGRATION TO MERCURY

To start with, I shall quote from H P Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time some unforgettable lines about the mind-swapping Great Race: alien intelligences who had been on our world for a long age - from about a billion to about fifty million years before our present day. 
    Originating on a distant, fantastically ancient, dying planet, they arrived here when they "sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them - the con-shaped things that peopled our earth a billion years ago.  Thus the Great Race came to be, while the myriad minds sent backward were left to die in the horror of strange shapes."

Stid:  Charming.  The rotters.

Zendexor:  And the ruthlessness is all the more effective in that Lovecraft doesn't bother to stress it - he has so much else to say, including stuff about a far nastier species which manages to terrify even the Great Race.  These adversaries of the G.R. are semi-polypous, semi-material horrors who have been banished underground and sealed off with trap doors...  Thus the reader is drawn ever deeper through zone upon zone of cosmic spine-chill. 
    But back to the Great Race - in its cone-shaped form it was "of a queer and intricate shape resembling no life-form known to science, which had lived till only fifty million years before the advent of man".

Stid:  I see: that terminal date of about 50,000,000 years before the present, together with the billion-year-old arrival, brackets the continuous career of the Great Race on our planet.  Except that they will come back, won't they?

Zendexor:  Not while we're around, but later, yes, they will reappear:

    ...After man there would be the mighty beetle civilization, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world (i.e. when the polypous things burst out from their confinement).    

Stid:  Again, rather selfish, to scarper and let the beetle-things cope with the polypous break-out.

Zendexor:  Well, that's life, Stid; at any rate in the HPL universe, it's horror eat horror.  Though in this case I'd say there must surely have been an interval before the beetle-intelligences evolved.  In all that time, the polypous horrors were slowly weakening; after all, the one the narrator meets on that night in Australia was already less than lethal, and by the time of the beetle folk they were most likely quite dormant, more or less.
    Anyway, let me get on to the point of this essay.  After the beetle civilization:

    ...Later, as the earth's span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space - to another stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury.

Stid:  And that's it?  No more migrations by the Great Race?

Zendexor:  No further escapes are mentioned in the story.

Stid:  Looks like the other races in the Galaxy will be able to breathe easily after that, then.  

Zendexor:  Yes, Mercury will be the end of the line for the Great Race.  And that theme is echoed in another work - a greatly different one - to which I've just been alerted by Lone Wolf, the weekly contributor to Guess The World and a great researcher into the byways of OSS literature.  The author is a theosophist, Charles Leadbeater, and using the link Lone Wolf sent me I quote from page 424 of volume II of The Inner Life (1911 edition):

Of our future home, Mercury, we know much less than of Mars, for visits to it have been hurried and infrequent. Many people would think it incredible that life such as ours could exist on Mercury, under a sun that appears at least seven times as large as it does here. The heat, however, is not at all so intense as would be supposed. I am informed that this is due to the presence of a layer of gas on the outskirts of the Mercurian atmosphere, which prevents most of the heat from penetrating. We are told also that the most destructive of all possible storms on Mercury is one which even for a moment disturbs the stability of this gaseous envelope. When that happens a kind of whirl-pool is set up in it, and for a moment a shaft of direct sunlight comes from the sun through its vortex. Such a shaft instantly destroys whatever life comes in its way, and burns up in a moment everything combustible. Fortunately such storms are rare. The inhabitants whom I have seen there are much like ourselves, though again somewhat smaller.     
    The influence of gravity both on Mars and Mercury is less than half what it is on earth, but while on Mars I did not notice any particular way in which advantage had been taken of this, I observed on Mercury that the doors of the houses were quite a considerable height from the ground, needing what for us would be a respectable gymnastic feat to reach them, though on Mercury it is only a light spring that is required. All the inhabitants of that planet are from birth possessed of etheric sight; I remember that the fact was first brought to my notice by observing a child who was watching the movements of some crawling creature; and I saw that when it entered its abode he was still able to follow its movements, even when it was deep down under the ground...

Stid:  Was this supposed to be fiction?

Zendexor:  Not supposed to be, no!  But it was all made up - as we now know, more's the pity!  It would be interesting to know whence the theosophists acquired their convictions of certainty.  [See the following Diary entry, Can a creative focus enlarge the real?]
    Anyhow, what I'm leading up to, is that with the thematic overlap of Lovecraft and Leadbeater we seem to be acquiring an accretion of the idea of Mercury as the future home of Man.  All we need now is a third angle on the theme and it will really take off.  It's an idea that should occur naturally, after all, to those who assume the Sun is getting cooler and cooler - a reasonable idea, though scientists now think the opposite is true.

MAGAZINE VS. BOOK

Researcher/contributor Lone Wolf remarked to me in an email of15 March:

Maybe this is just a personal taste of mine, but I've noticed that when some novel or novelette from the pulp era is adapted and published as a book later, I usually prefer the original magazine version better, like for instance Leigh Brackett's stories featuring Eric John Stark. This is especially so with her second Martian story of this series - Black Amazon of Mars, with its quasi-Lovecraftian Ice Creatures, which in the book version are replaced with just some lost Martian tribe living out of phase with physical reality, if I remember correctly (something so much less interesting that I even don't remember all the details). The indirect allusion to a native life on Phobos is also removed from the text - here's the comparison of the same sentence from the two versions:

But the Martian had fought beside him through a long guerrilla campaign among the harried tribes of the nearer moon.  (Black Amazon of Mars, Planet Stories, March 1951)

But the Martian had fought beside him through a long guerrilla campaign far to the south, among the harried tribes of the Dryland borders. (People of the Talisman, 1962) 

I don't think this is due only to the need to adapt the settings in accord with the progress of astronomical knowledge (it's still the OSS period and the possibility of life on small moons and asteroids was scientifically speaking highly improbable even in that era), but it's just that in pulp SF there reigned that carefree attitude in which anything goes so long as it is made to seem probable and makes a good story. I think this type of literature functioned as a kind of folklore of the scientific era and the pulp magazines with their community of readers were like an equivalent of the city taverns and similar places in olden times, where fantastic highly exaggerated stories of sailors and travellers could be heard and so legends were born (like the stories about Ulysses, Sindbad, etc.). Their charm perhaps comes precisely from their obvious improbability, just like the tales of Baron Munchhausen.   

Zendexor:  LW is, I'm sure, on to something here, and his remarks make me want to read Black Amazon of Mars.
    However, I have never regarded the strange northern Martians in People of the Talisman as "just some lost Martian tribe", i.e. like the rest of the human COMOLD bunch.  To me they have always been non-human "real Martians".  Partly perhaps that's due to the illustration on the cover of my Ace books edition!  But also, this view of them is supported (in my view) by their first appearance in the text:

  ...five figures had appeared in the street.  ...They were very tall, these figures, towering over the people of Kushat, towering even over Stark, but they were excessively slender and they moved with swaying motion like reeds before the wind...  queer tall caps...exaggerated their elongated narrow skulls...  a structure of facial bones that seemed to be all brow and jaw with little in between but two great round eyes like dark moons...  

That decided the issue for me on first reading and ever since.  

Stid:  But perhaps you were hasty in shutting off your attention from this issue after that one first impression.  One could argue to a different conclusion from a passage a few pages further on:

    ...Thanis said furiously, "Ban Cruach would never have promised his help to these monsters."
    "That was a long time ago," Stark said.  "I doubt that they were monsters then..."

Given a modicum of ingenuity you could interpret this as a hint that the oddities of these elongated people are the result of age-long evolution away from the human norm, which means they could still count as a basically human tribe, isolated rather than alien.

Zendexor:  I could indeed argue thus, but I would not.  That's not to deny that your citation is worth thinking about; but one must assess the total effect of Brackett's depiction of the folk who live beyond the "Gates of Death", her portrayal of their mentality, and the way they move, and the spooky part they play in the story; and at the end of it all I come back to saying that they are real non-human Martians.
    One last point: it's certainly interesting to learn that in the original tale Phobos was imagined as sufficiently ample to contain "harried tribes"!  Very carefree writing, as LW points out.  Any chance of justifying the idea logically?  Using one's excuse-making power at full strength one might envisage a special short-range gravitational force (an idea I've used in some of my own stories) which operates only close to the surface of small worlds, undetectable at greater distances, and thus resulting in cases of surprising habitability... 
    That would help explain conditions on the asteroid Iskar.

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?