Science fiction is often about discovering new things. Sometimes it is also about loss. Consider, for example, the SF authors of the early space probe era. On the plus side, after years of writing about Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and the other worlds of the Solar System, they would find out what those worlds were really like. On the minus side, all the infinite possibilities would be replaced by a single reality—one that probably wouldn’t be much like the Solar System of the old pulp magazines.
Not that science fiction’s consensus Old Solar System, featuring dying Mars and Martians, or swamp world Venus, was ever plausible. Even in the 1930s, educated speculations about the other planets were not optimistic about the odds that the other worlds were so friendly as to be merely dying. (Don’t believe me? Sample John W. Campbell’s articles from the mid-1930s.)
Science fiction authors simply ignored what science was telling them in pursuit of thrilling stories.
If an author was very, very unlucky, that old Solar System might be swept away before a work depending on an obsolete model made it to print. Perhaps the most famous example was due to radar technology deployed at just the wrong time. When Larry Niven’s first story, “The Coldest Place,” was written, the scientific consensus was that Mercury was tide-locked, one face always facing the sun, and one always facing away. The story relies on this supposed fact. By the time it was published, radar observation had revealed that Mercury actually had a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance. Niven’s story was rendered obsolete before it even saw print.
Space probe schedules are known years in advance. It would be easy to plan around the flyby dates to ensure stories were not undermined as Niven’s was.
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To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
Authors did not always bother. Podkayne of Mars, for example, was serialized in Worlds of If from November 1962 to March 1963. In December 1962, Mariner 2 revealed a Venus nothing like Heinlein’s, well before the novel was fully serialized.
An impending deadline imposed by a probe approaching another world could be inspirational. Roger Zelazny reportedly felt that he could not continue writing stories set on the Mars of the old planetary romances once space probes had revealed Mars as it is1. The Soviet Mars 1 failed on route to Mars in March 1963, buying Zelazny a little time, but more probes would no doubt come. Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” depicting a fateful encounter between an arrogant Earthman and seemingly doomed Martians, saw print in November 1963. Mariner 4 revealed Mars to the Earth in July 1965. Zelazny’s tale may not be the final pre-Mariner 4 story to see print, but it’s probably the most significant just-barely-pre-Mariner story set on Mars.
At least two sets of editors decided to fast forward through the Kubler-Ross model, zipping past denial, anger, bargaining, and depression straight on to acceptance. Raging against the loss of the Old Solar System won’t make the Old Solar System return. Faced with new information about Venus, Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison decided to publish 1968’s Farewell, Fantastic Venus, which collected short pieces, essays, and excerpts of longer works that the pair felt comprised the best of the pre-probe tales.
Farewell, Fantastic Venus gave the impression of grognards reluctantly acknowledging change. Frederik and Carol Pohl’s 1973 Jupiter took a more positive tack, celebrating Pioneers 10 and 11 with an assortment of classic SF stories about old Jupiter. I prefer the Pohls’ approach, which may be why I prefer Jupiter to Farewell, Fantastic Venus. Or perhaps it’s just that the stories in Jupiter are superior to those in Farewell, Fantastic Venus. Plus it had that great Berkey cover.
The glorious flood of information from advanced space probes and telescopes does not seem likely to end any time soon, which means there is still time to write stories and edit anthologies powered by the friction between the universe as it is and as we dreamed it might be. Not just in the increasingly wondrous Solar System, but also neighbouring stellar systems about which we know increasingly more. Celebrate the new Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, and Barnard’s Star with the best stories of the old.2
Originally published July 2019.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Well, as Mars seemed to be, given the limited data provided by each probe. What was thought to be true changes from probe to probe.
[2]The Great Classic SF Stories about Teegarden’s Star doesn’t exist, sabotaged by the widespread refusal of pulp-era SF authors to use the system as a setting (on the specious grounds that Teegarden’s Star was not discovered until 2003).
Zelazny also wrote the last of the great Wet Venus stories – “The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth”.
My favorite example of an author adapting to new knowledge about our solar system is Leigh Brackett. She wrote some of the very best sword and planet stories for the pulps back in the ’40s and ’50s. But in the 1970s, when she decided to revive her greatest character from those stories, Eric John Stark, she sent him interstellar to the dying world of Skaith. Interestingly she kept his origin story of being raised in the Twilight Belt of Mercury by semi-human savages after his Earth human parents were killed in an avalanche. I suppose it was too key to the character to be retconned away.
@1: And he wrote that one in 1965, a couple of years after Mariner 2.
More recently, Dozois and Martin edited two anthologies, Old Mars and Old Venus, with new stories set on the traditional pulp-era versions of those planets.
And Fred Pohl didn’t seem to care about publishing stories set on a tide-locked Mercury even after the discovery that it was in 3:2 resonance. He published C. C. MacApp’s “The Mercurymen” in the December 1965 Galaxy, exactly a year after Niven’s “The Coldest Place” appeared in If.
S.M. Stirling wrote a recent pair of planetary adventure books, The Sky People and In the Courts of the Crimson Kings. They were presented as alternate history, set in a solar system where mysterious visitors, eons ago, visited the solar system, and terraformed the two planets of Venus and Mars.
Harry Turtledove also went the alternate history route in A World of Difference. The preface talks about how Mars would be more interesting if it were larger, with a decent atmosphere, and then sets the tale on Minerva, the improved Mars from another timeline.
A lot of the dying Mars stories were because Percival Lowell’s view of canals on Mars was accepted as-is, instead of what it actually was, a mistranslation of the word canali, which is an Italian word meaning either “channel” or “canal,” resulting in what must be one of the longest-lasting “oopsies” from words in different languages that look alike but have different meanings. Another classic example is the Spanish word “embarazada” which looks enough like the English word “embarrassed” be worth at least one or two giggles. Astronomers knew, pretty early, that Mars did not have an atmosphere breathable by humans by watching stars being occulted.
I wonder how many dying Mars stories were written by authors whose first language was Italian or, at least, not English….
Then there’s the “Rainbow Mars” approach …
Then there’s the example that Andy Weir likes to mention in his discussions of writing The Martian, in which the route he selected for Mark Whatley looked clear from what he knew when he was writing it, but then came one of the orbiters with better cameras, and turned out the route he selected would have been insanely difficult. Ooops.