Dido And Aeneas

Dido and Aeneas, the third and fourth planets in the Virgilian system, are like a (barely) habitable Venus and a habitable Mars with no Earth between them. See here and here.

Dido has no moon but its eccentric orbit with average radius of one a.u., extreme axial tilt of 38 degrees and rapid rotation period of 8 hours, 47 minutes, cause turbulent seas and weather. Approaching the planet, Flandry sees dazzling, stormy white clouds on the dayside and aurora and lightning on the night side.

The oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere is unacceptably hot and dense, although breathable, but the tropics are lethal to unprotected human beings. Tectonic activity is intense. Vegetation is brown, red, purple and gold. The ground cover, "carpet weed," resembles small red-brown sponges.

Yet again, Poul Anderson imagines a planetary environment differing in fundamental details from the terrestrial: different colors and ground cover and a much shorter day - also, very dissimilar inhabitants. See here and here. 

Another Detail Of Life On The Moon

Anderson, Poul, "Escape The Morning" IN Anderson, Space Folk (New York, 1989), pp. 52-63.

Quite often in these posts, I try to communicate the richness of Poul Anderson's texts by summarizing the information that he conveys in his imaginative descriptions of extraterrestrial scenery, futuristic scenarios etc, but it is hard to include everything. When summarizing his accounts of three kinds of Lunar vehicle, I overlooked this important detail:

"...even the best glass is fragile and a poor radiation shield..." (p. 54)

- so Mark Jordan, driving his "turtle," views the surrounding Lunar landscape and skyline not through windows but on TV screens. We soon learn that a space rock hitting the surface scatters shrapnel that makes holes in metal so mere glass would indeed have been too fragile.

I compared this single short story to the several Moon-based stories in Heinlein's Future History. All of these well observed details, like TV screens instead of windows, deserve to re-used in successive installments of a series rather than squandered on a single work. Indeed, any fictional narrative set in the future is potentially an installment of a fictitious history. Probably several near future stories of interplanetary travel could, with minimal editing, be re-presented as sharing a common background comparable to that of Heinlein's Future History. Such a "history" can be constructed either on the basis that only stories which explicitly refer to each other are to be included or on the basis that only stories which explicitly contradict each other are to be excluded. Clarifying which of these criteria was to be applied led to some uncertainty as to the contents of Heinlein's Time Chart in its early days.

The Nature Of The Catastrophe And The Point Of The Story

Anderson, Poul, "Escape The Morning" IN Anderson, Space Folk (New York, 1989), pp. 52-63.

There are three kinds of vehicle on the Lunar surface:

a four-wheeled, egg-shaped Go-Devil can travel at 50 mph;
the more common eight-wheeled, oblong turtle manages 20 mph max;
a lead-armored tank, "...screened by intense magnetic fields..." (p. 61) is necessary in daylight during solar flare periods - at other times, thermostatic suits are sufficient to protect against a temperature at the boiling point of water.

There are no roads, only safe routes marked by luminous stones a kilometer apart. Anderson visually imagines this detail: "...the coal-like mineral crust..." (p. 55) scatters Earthlight so that a vehicle seems to move in a blue spotlight. (Earth is four times the size of the Moon seen from Earth and many times brighter.)

Small meteorite showers on long-period orbits strike unexpectedly. When a rock hits the surface, it scatters material that can wreck a vehicle. When the Zairean Minister of Technology's Go-Devil is wrecked, Mark Jordan rescues him in a turtle but, when the turtle also is wrecked, the Minister must learn how to run on the Moon in order to reach Jordan Station before a lethal sunrise: "Push, glide, come down, check." (p. 62)

Grateful for the rescue, the Minister offers to pay for the Jordans to receive an education and start a career on Earth and now we reach the point of the story, which is is the same as that of Robert Heinlein's Future History short story, "It's Great To Be Back!" Lunar colonists are at home on the Moon. Why would they go to Earth?

Escape The Morning II

See Escape The Morning.

Anderson, Poul, "Escape The Morning" IN Anderson, Space Folk (New York, 1989), pp. 52-63.

A Lunar station is an isolated enterprise. Jordan Station mined ice but exhausted their vein and, in any case, so much water has been found that the price has gone down so they now mine copper and, when they have saved enough capital, might extract oil.

Lunar oil is "'Heterocyclic compounds formed by photochemical reactions in the original dust cloud that became the Solar System'" (p. 57), and can be used to make rocket fuel.

Mr and Mrs Jordan died two years ago in a pit collapse before it had been learned "'...that ferraloy cross-braces can change into a weaker crystalline form under Lunar conditions.'" (ibid.) Mark Jordan and his younger brother and sister now run the automated station, receive education by two-way television from Tycho Crater and entertainment broadcasts from Earth and deliver ore to Copernicus Town and Keplersburg. Next year, when Mark moves to the Tycho University dorm to take lab courses for an engineering degree, Tom, who is two years younger, will run the station and hire an assistant.

Thus, Anderson briefly sketches economic, educational and social features of life on the Moon and underlines, for his younger readers, that:

"'Pioneers have always had to grow up fast...'" (p. 58)

Escape The Morning

Here, I made three comparisons between Poul Anderson and Robert Heinlein. Here is a fourth. An entire section of Heinlein's Future History features near future Lunar colonization and some of these stories are narrated from juvenile points of view, including one about a Boy Scout en route to the colony on Venus but meanwhile lost on the Moon.

Juvenile novels were a major part of Heinlein's output. To some extent, his juvenile fiction and his Future History overlap. Not only are there a handful of juvenile stories in the Future History but, further, several of the Scribner Juvenile novels share a considerable amount of background material with the History despite not being fully consistent with that series.

Anderson did not write anything like the same amount of juvenile fiction but nevertheless incorporated four juvenile short stories into his major future history series, the History of Technic Civilization, and one longer juvenile work, originally published as a single volume, into his Time Patrol series. His non-series short story, "Escape The Morning," is Heinleinian in every respect:

published in Boy's Life and copyright Boy Scouts of America;
featuring a juvenile hero who is a Lunar colonist and is called on to rescue a stranded VIP.

Returning from Anderson's time travel collection, Past Times, to his space travel collection, Space Folk, I have just begun to reread "Escape The Morning" and find that I remember none of the details so that it is almost like reading a new story.