themes

In the Old Solar System the basic themes are the worlds themselves, but comparative OSS planetology brings out, in addition, an endless supply of other deserving headings.

---

Alien invasions: see below under "invasions of Earth from other worlds"

Alien scripts.

America's Own Haunting.

Anthologies: see Do-It-Yourself Anthologies and My Favorite Anthology. 
                      See also the OSS Diary for 12 September 2016.

Appreciation: see Literary Criticism.

Archaeology: see Alien Scripts and Academia on Mars.

Architecture:  see The Seven Wonders of the Old Solar System

Bad language - see the OSS Diary, 24th-25th September 2016.

Battles - see Decisive Battles of the Old Solar System.
                 For the Battle of Hastings see History and the OSS.

Bio-engineering: see the OSS Diary, 22nd September 2016.

James Bond - see The muse takes control.

Boundary between OSS and NSS - see the Diary for 5th May 2017;
                          see also the Diary, Niven and Clarke on the Cusp.

Brains: see hyper-brains.

British Interplanetary Society - see the Diary for 2nd December 2016 for
                         one of R A Smith's illustrations from High Road to the Moon. 

Brown dwarfs:  see For an unwritten tale of Planet X.

Bryson, Bill - for One Summer see 1959, The Twilight Zone and a call to Bill Bryson

Byzantium - see Jasoomian Jeddak.

Captain Future - For the Solar System of Captain Future see the pages on Jupiter, Saturn,
                                 Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. 
                           For The Tenth Planet see the Diary, Poetic Licence in the Asteroid Belt.
                           See also the OSS Diary, 24 January 2017 for remarks
                                 on non-Hamilton C.F. tales. 
                           For Allen M Steele's revival of the series see The Captain Returns!  
                                 and Retaliators of Luna.        
                           See Ul Quorn Back from the Dead for The Solar Invasion by
                                           Manly Wade Wellman.
                           For Captain Future on the asteroid Iskar see
                                           How to borrow a fictional asteroid.
                           Re tracking the stories, and sites, see the Diary entry entitled
                                           Captain Future and the Unobtainable.
                           For Calling Captain Future see Celestial Intruders.

Catastrophes - see the OSS Diary, 4th February 2017 for when the Earth ceases to rotate.
                          See also Time to Rest.

Categories - see World-Builders and World-Disturbers.

Cathexis - see the Diary, Cathexis in C S Lewis and Heinlein.

Cetaceans - see A Prehistoric World War.

Changing one's mind about a book - see the OSS Diary, 29th September 2016, regarding
                                                               Philip K Dick and Clark Ashton Smith.

Characters of worlds - see also the Diary, Backbone of the Old Solar System.
                               For discussions on the allowable limits of world-imagining, see
                                    for example the Asteroids page, and the discussion in
                                    An Ice-Age Venus?   

Children's fiction:  for young children, see the Diary, The Torn-Off Moon.

Children's science: see A Book with the Right Idea for You Will Go To The Moon.
                           Also see Craters yes, dish holes no, for the importance of not
                                       talking down to youngsters.

China - see Chinese Lunar Rover: Navigation and Names   

Chronist Fallacy in sf criticism - see the home page and also
                            Clarke Contradicts Himself.

Chronology - see Fictional Dates.  Also, see the OSS Diary, 15th February 2017, for
                                     Leigh Brackett's chronology.
                      See the OSS Diary for 25th October 2016 for a proposed system.
                      See also Periodicity.

Cities.

Coincidons - see Venus - The Long Rain and The Big Rain.

Composition of OSS tales: see the OSS Diary, 3rd August 2016.

Criteria for an ideal OSS series - see the OSS Diary, 6th March 2017, and
                                     John Greer's A Fifth Parameter.
                              For balancing civilized sophistication with adventurous peril, see
                                     the OSS Diary for 7th March 2017.

Culture layer - for Earth's, see the Diary for 28th January 2017, and the
                                  pages on Star's Reach and the Far Future.  For
                                  that of another world see especially Uranian Gleams.

Cyclical history - see the OSS Diary, 2nd March 2017.

Dates:  see also fictional dates.
            Real dates:
                 1893 - see the OSS Diary for 21st October 2016.
                 1905 - see Hearts Leaped in 1905 re the Martian "canals".  
                 1941 - see the Diary for 27th November 2016, re Astounding's
                                               special year.   
                 1956 - see The Last Hope for Old Mars
                 1959, The Twilight Zone - and a call to Bill Bryson

Dating systems - see Chronology.

Dawkins, Richard - see Long Live the Billion-Year Space Reich.

Decisive Battles of the Old Solar System    

Definitions - their usefulness or otherwise - see the OSS Diary for 9th March 2017.
        Definition and range of the OSS: see Stretching the OSS, Re Stretching the OSS,
                                                                   and But is it NOSS?.

Demography - see the OSS Diary, 13th November 2016, for
                          Old Solar System population figures

Determinism - see the OSS Diary, 8th November 2016, for Man of the World's
                             sly jibe at historical "inevitability"

Devils - see The Dark Eldils.

Dig Allen - see The Dig Allen Series.

Dignity - see the OSS Diary for 26th October 2016.

Distance - see Vast Distances of the Old Solar System.
                  See also the OSS Diary for 9th July 2016 and 5th December 2016.

Drinks - for Jovian fire-liquor see the OSS Diary, 5th April 2017.

Dyson spheres - for Colin Kapp's Cageworld see
                                     The most over-the-top Dyson sphere scheme.
                           For a plea against Adrian Berry's schemes see Save Jupiter.

the Electrum Age of SF    

Engineering:  See Bridge.

Enlargement of planetary scope - see Distending Worlds.

Eucatastrophe.

Expedition diaries - see the OSS Diary, 13th February 2017, for
                                       Gordon A Giles' Via Asteroid.

The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750-1900, by Michael J Crowe (1986) -
            - see Diary entries re populations of worlds;
                Gruithuisen on accessions of Venusian emperors
                                            and life on the Moon;
                other nineteenth-century arguments for lunar life;
                John Herschel's views about possible life on the Sun;
                and Sir Humphrey Davy on Saturnians.
                For the Mars canal furore see Hearts Leaped in 1905.

Failure - literary and critical - see Confession Time.

Familiarity - see Home on Mars.

Far Future.

Fate - for Stapledon's fate-worship see the religion page.

Fauna:  see the OSS Diary, 2nd February 2017, for Martian zoology
                      in ERB and Moorcock.

Fictional Dates.

Flatland - see The FLATOSS.

Flora: see Intelligent Plants and Leda.

France:  see Bifurcated Souls - France-OSS and Planet D'Artagnan.
              For French millennial date-resonances see Another mysterious Terran realm.
              For a French view of Mars see Mars et la terre à la belle époque.

Games:  see Have any of you heard of Space: 1889?  

Gaseous life-forms: see the Rings of Saturn.

GAWI

Geographical Horror - see Tilted Landscape, Pre-Kroth.  And then see Kroth.

Geophysical Romance - see the OSS Diary, 23rd-24th September 2016, for
                                            Hot Planet and The Hab Theory.

Giant planets - for summary see the OSS Diary for 27th October 2016.

"Going native" - see The New Martians.

Golden Age of a world: for Golden Age Mars see the OSS Diary, 3rd November 2016.

Goodness - see A Martian Poet Saves the Human Race.

Gravitic Licence:  See the Triton page
                             plus the Diary entries, Suspension of Gravitational Disbelief and
                                 Poetic Licence in the Asteroid Belt: the case of localised gravity.

Gravity:  see Kroth.  Also see above, under Gravitic Licence.

Hiatus in space-travel: see the Diary, Resuming long-interrupted colonization.

History: for the Battle of Hastings see History and the OSS. 
                For Alexius Comnenus see Jasoomian Jeddak.

Histories of imaginary worlds - see Uranian Gleams;
                                              see also the Diary, A Fun Sub-Sub-Genre.

Horror:  see Hyper-brains, H P Lovecraft and Lurkers on the Moon.

How lucky we are - see the OSS Diary for 3rd April 2017.

Humour - for Wacky World see Hamilton Goes on a Detour.

Hyper-brains.

the Implicizer - see the Diary for 5th November 2016 regarding this suggested invention for
                             creating stories that authors might have written.

Inconsistency - see the OSS Diary 19-21 July 2016

Indiana Jones - see In the Tombs of the Martian Kings for this particular sub-sub-genre
                                atmosphere.

Infra-red eyesight: see the OSS Diary for 22nd February 2017, for IR vision
                         in Alfred Bester and Poul Anderson

Inspiration - see Local Mojo.

Intelligent plants.

Interstellar vs Solar System settings: see the OSS Diary, 4th August 2016.
                    CRIM and the OSS compared - see the Diary for 11th October 2016.
                    A grumble about "desertions to interstellar":
                                      OSS Diary, 27th February 2017.
                    Combined venues: see the OSS Diary for 4th April 2017.

Intruders: celestial bodies from outside the System

Invasions of Earth by other worlds: see invasions from Mercury; also see
                      the OSS Diary for 8th August 2016.
                      Invasions from Venus: see the Diary, Straight Talk from Eric Frank Russell.

Jasoomisation - or seeing our planet as one ERBian adventure-world among others:
                      see I-Spy Jasoom.  Also, for Earth developing some old-mysterious-planet
                      vibes see Star's Reach.
                      See also Jasoomian Jeddak.

Licence to stretch - see Mercury's Sun.

Life - for the possible varities of "inorganic" OSS life see the Diary,
                      29th November 2016.
         See also under "The Extraterrestrial Life Debate" and "Lowered expectations
                      of the Solar System"

Literary criticism - for the inherent advantage of positive over adverse criticism,
                see the Diary,
                      9th October 2016, which argues why Posi always beats Nega.  See also
                      the "praise approach" outlined in the 1st October 2016 Diary.
                      For the three stages of appreciation, see the Diary, 6th October 2016.

Literary space, physics of: see Venus - The Long Rain and The Big Rain.

Literary style - see the OSS Diary for 29th March 2017.
        See also Anderson on Tour - Lyrical but Compressed.

Literary theory - see The Psychic-Accretion model of OSS formation.

Lowered expectations of the Solar System:
          see Another lot who don't know how lucky they are.  For remaining
                  grounds for optimism see Scoring ruts through space.

Medieval cosmology - see The Dark Eldils

Millennial anniversaries - see the OSS Diary for 20 and 21 March 2017.

Minerva - see the OSS Diary, 10th December 2016, for this name as used
                     by James P Hogan and by Edmund Cooper for different worlds.

Mis-reading a story - see Beetles or Winged Folk - Who Rules Mars? regarding Wells'
                                          The Crystal Egg.

the moment of amaze  

Morphic resonance - see the religion page re categories of thought

Multi-pocket worlds

Musk, Elon - see Long Live the Billion-Year Space Reich.
                       For the influence of Tintin on Musk see Astronautical Conjunction.

Myth - see More Perelandrian Insights.

Names.

Narration - see The Voices of Narrators.

National identity: see America's Own Haunting

Natural law - see Swodge

Nebraska - see Nebraska Invaded  

neologisms - for the unisex pronoun "nen" on Uranus see the OSS Diary, 27th-28th
                                                                                                       September 2016.

Neo-OSS:  see NOSS.

the Newness of Old: see the OSS Diary for 20th October 2016.

NHOSS - and see the serial by David England entitled  Twilight of Empires  -
                    plus:      Arabella of Mars  -  Sailing the Seven Spaceways  - 
                                  A Man Without Honor  -  An NHOSS Tale of Victorian Mars  -
                                  The Martian Ambassador 

NOOLD: see the Newness of Old.

NOSS - see NOSS - How Far Can We Go?
                  See also the sub-sub-genre labels in the OSS Diary, 10th March 2017,
                                and But is it NOSS?
                   See also Robert Gibson and S M Stirling.
                   Ideas for more NOSS stories are set out in Tales Unwritten.

nostalgia - see the Old Space Program;
                 for 1950s America see the OSS Diary, 18th September 2016 re
                                                                                          Three to Conquer

The Old Space Program.

optimism - see the Diary for 30th November 2016, re The Sands of Mars.

Parallelism between the OSS and the NSS:
            See the Diary, Ghostly Twitches from the OSS, for creative interpretion
                                     of real-time events

Paratext - see Olhoav map and the timeline in Uranian Eras.

Partial Realism

Pastiche - for the Jandar series see the Callisto page and Thanator - For and Against;
                  for speculation regarding an "implicizer" see the Diary, 5th November 2016.

the Paxman Fallacy - see Relations with the Real.

Periodicity - see the OSS Diary, 22nd October 2016 and 25th October 2016.

Philosophy - see Solar System of Ideas.

Planetary change (Diary, 3rd May 2017); see also under Enlargement

Planetary Intelligences - OSS Diary 18th April 2017.

Planetfall - see Unexpected Survival at Planetfall.

Plotformity - see under Writing Techniques.

Plying the Space-Lanes.  See also under Space-pilots.

Prehistory - see A Prehistoric World War.

Present - for the years 1955 and 1966 as candidates
                                           see the OSS Diary, 7th December 2016.

Primordial worlds.

Props - see Emotion and the World of Null-A for ideas as mere props;
                  and see The Worship of Tur for religion as a mere prop.

the Psychic-Accretion Model of OSS formation  

Radioactive life.

Range of the OSS: see Stretching the OSS and Re Stretching the OSS.

Reality engineering: see Uranian Gleams; quoted also in the Diary, Planetary Change. 
                                        Also see the OSS Diary, 15-16 March 2017 and
                                        Time Travel and Reality Change.

Rejections of stories by publishers:
                        see the Diary, 7th October 2016, re H P Lovecraft and Farnsworth Wright.

Relevantitis - see the Diary, 7th January 2018, and the Home Page's section on useful
                       terms.

Religion. 
         And for fake religion see Gather, Darkness!

Remote sensing as the enemy of adventure:
                     see the OSS Diary, 7th November 2016, for a modified grumble.

Re-writes:   see the OSS Diary, 8th March 2017 for an analogy with the "colourisation"
                    of old films

Carl Sagan:  for his comments on Huygens' supposed ideas, see Hemp on Jupiter...

Science:  see the OSS Diary, 7th August 2016 for realism vs shaky science;
                       the OSS Diary, 15th September 2016 for "hard" sf and the OSS;
                       the Diary entry for Partial Realism;
                       the OSS Diary, 3rd February 2017 for the connection between
                              imagination and science stretched but never entirely broken;
                       the OSS Diary, 21st February 2017 for
                                   fictional use of "false-colour" images;
                for "excusology" see the Diary, Science Points the Way - Now Go and Play;
                for topographical realism see Verticality.
                Future science allowing for the spirit: see discussion of an episode from
                          The Night Land, on the religion page.
                Science and circular reasoning.
                See below, Suspension of disbelief.

Sentence-structure:  see Edgar Rice Burroughs' sentence-structure.

Sequels:  see My OSS Sequel Wish-List.

The Seven Wonders of the Old Solar System

Silicon life.

Size - for OSS emotional truth and its licence to stretch, see Mercury's Sun.

Site policy
            Re criticism of living authors: see the Diary, 1st October 2016.

Sky-scapes - see The Best Views in the Solar System.

Slavery: see Dylan Jeninga's travelogue Slaves of Venus; see also moral dimensions.

Slow space travel - see Vast distances of the Old Solar System
                                and also see the OSS Diary for 24th August 2016
                                                          and 5th December 2016.

Smith, Ralph A. (illustrator) - see the Diary for 2nd December 2016.

Space - for qualities pertaining to the void see Staining Space.

Space Patrol (TV series) - see the OSS Diary for 10th August 2016.
                         See also Hostile perambulating Uranian leeks.

Space-pilots - see the OSS Diary for 6th April 2017.  See also Plying the Space-Lanes.

Space suits: old-style, like suits of armour: see the Diary for 2nd December 2016.

Space-Westerns: see Space-Western Admixture.

Sparsely-Speckled Oceanic - see Nebraska Invaded.   

Style:  see Edgar Rice Burroughs' sentence-structure.
        For the relation of style and content see the OSS Diary for 9th and 10th April 2017.
             See also Appreciating Lovecraft's English.
             For pace and balance see Please avoid crammy/jerky.

Surfaces of the giant planets: see the OSS Diary for 18th July 2016.
                                    See also the Diary for 5th September 2016 for
                                                      the meaning of "surface".

Surprise - see Perturbable Protagonists Required.

Swodge - see NOSS - How Far Can We Go?

Tarzan - for a view of his character and role see The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Telemetry-bane.

Telemorphs - see the OSS Diary for 30th March 2017.

Time-scales - for contrasting time-scales in Wells and Stapledon, see the
                                       OSS Diary for 20th February 2017.

Time-Travel and Reality-Change.
                      For reality-engineering in Uranian Gleams
                              see the Diary, Planetary Change.

Tintin - for Objectif Lune and Elon Musk, see Astronautical Conjunction.

Topography - see the Diary, Verticality.

"Topology" in the literary sense: 
            see the Pluto page and the OSS Diary for 3rd March 2017.
            For "topological Time" see the Diary, The Torn-Off Moon.

Transitions - see the Diary entry, The Image-Beads of A E van Vogt.

Truthfulness - see the Diary entry, Ganymede as a Frontier.

TV:  see Space Patrol and Twilight Zone. 

Twilight Zone, the - see Mars and the Twilight Zone.
                                See also 1959, The Twilight Zone - and a call to Bill Bryson.

Unappreciativeness - see the Diary, Bellyaching Spacemen.

Unreasonable (but fun) criticism:  see
               Unreasonable demands and absurd comparisons (in the Diary for
                                   29th and 30th December 2016) and Unreasonable fun.

Harold Urey:  for his theory of the lunar maria, see Watery Lunar Seas.

Vast Distances of the Old Solar System. 
                See also the OSS Diary for 9 July 2016 and 5 December 2016.

Vertigo: see Kroth.  See also the quotation from C S Lewis in
                                     the OSS Diary for 14th July 2016.

Villain/hero: see the OSS Diary for 24 July 2016.

Voice-Over - authorial comment.

Warfare - see Decisive Battles of the Old Solar System.

Wild West - analogies with OSS:  see the Diary, 7th November 2016.

Wishful thinking: see "Wishful Thinking Mars - But Which One?"
                                                                   in the OSS Diary for 12th April 2017.

World-Builders and World-Disturbers

Writing techniques:  see Never Waste a Typo and Enforcing Plotformity.

Young Old Solar System (YOSS)
        see the OSS Diary for 26th March 2017 regarding Jupiter and the asteroids,
         and see 30th October 2016 for ancient Jupiter.
         For ancient Mars see the Diary for 31st October 2016.
         Also see the tales unwritten page.

the Zohac - "Zone of Hope and Credulity":
         for the USAF's Project Horizon see A Flash of Ambitious Hope in 1959;
         for Harold Urey on the lunar maria see Watery Lunar Seas;
         for the last pre-Space Age close opposition of Mars see
                    1956 - The Last Hope for Old Mars?  
         and for the last gasp of the idea of life on the lunar Farside see
                     The Hidden Side of the Moon - 1949 - 1959.

Zoology of the future - see the Diary for 9th November 2016.

Home › Themes