Vast Distances of the Old Solar System

by Dylan Jeninga
(Chicago, Illinois, USA)

I was reading your Dec. 5 diary, Zendexor, and I confess that I wish the long voyage to nearby planets had been a more persistant trope!

"Space is hard!" I don't remember who said that, but I've heard it called NASA's unofficial slogan. A better slogan might be "Per Aspera Ad Astra", "through difficulty, to the stars." While I love a space opera or western (in fact, I'd like to write one sometime), nothing preserves the alien nature of the solar system like distance. And by distance, I mean time.

I've actually been thinking about this particular subject. I recently aquired a game called "Kerbal Space Program", which has you heading up the space program for a planet of adorable little green men called Kerbals. Despite the comedic value of the Kerbalnauts, I understand the rocketry is fairly realistic, and I was introduced to the game by an engineer friend of mine.

Anyways, I sent my Kerbalnauts to colonize their Solar System's Venusian standin, a planet called Eve. It's the nearest planet to Kerbal-Earth, but nonetheless it took two years (from the passenger's perspective) for my colony ship to move its 800 Kerbals into Eve's gravity well. It occurred to me that even though Eve was relatively close to Kerbal-Earth, my Kerbalnauts were as isolated as if they had traveled to a distant star. The physical miles didn't matter, it was the time it took to get there that gave the feeling of distance.

The OSS did it best, of course. No Man Friday and Voyage to Sfanomoe both communicate interplanetary distance well, to add to your list. The Rolling Stones (also known as Space Family Stone) and Between Planets are two Heinlein works that feature long excursions with lots of downtime. In Stirling's Lords of Creation books, the difficulty of reaching Mars or Venus is part of the setup: only the best are sent and they are trained to make almost everything themselves, since it will be a long time before a supply ship can reach them. I'm sure there are dozens of other examples, we could probably compile quite a list!

NSS fiction, which appears to be having something of a mini renaissance over interstellar fiction, seems to have a decent respect for distance as well. A major mechanism of Andy Weir's The Martian is the enormous amount of time that must elapse before rescue or resupply can reach Astronaut Mark Watney. James A Corey's Expanse series is set in a colonized Solar System wherein ice haulers make years-long treks between Saturn and Ceres. In that one in particular, the plot gets going when a particular ice hauler picks up a distress signal from another ship a million clicks away, and they must answer it because they are the closest ship by far!

I hope this trend continues. Aside from making space seem "hard", it helps to preserve the individuality of the planets by keeping them from being too neighborly. Planet-hopping, as you said, is a good thing in many stories, but only as long as it does not drown out the stories with more respect for distance.

{Z: All this reminds me that in some of Lovecraft's writing - possible "A Whisperer in Darkness" among others - there are creatures who traverse space "on their vast membranous wings". That must make for slow travel! Presumably they tack against the solar wind.}