Designing A Universe

People used to imagine a breathable atmosphere not only on other planets but also between planets. In Karen Anderson's "The Piebald Hippogriff," a boy rides a hippogriff through a blue sky to a cultivable Moon but this is unadulterated fantasy. David D Levine's contribution to Old Mars is sf set in an alternative universe with different laws of physics. Lifted by balloons, Captain Kidd's ship sails through the Terrestrial, interplanetary and Martian atmospheres down to the surface of Mars where the inhabitants, for a change, are not humanoid but crab-like. (We know that we will get Martians but not what they will be like.)

We are not unfamiliar with interplanetary atmospheres. A breathable atmosphere stretches between planets with a common orbit in an ERB work and Larry Niven's Smoke Ring is a torus of breathable gasses encircling a star at a planetary distance. However, Levine's Solar atmosphere requires different laws of gravity. Thus, this story about an alternative Mars also presents an alternative history and cosmology. The cosmology could be the premise of another themed anthology.

If Poul Anderson had contributed to such an anthology, then I would expect his story to outline the alternative laws of physics enabling the Solar gravitational field to hold a breathable atmosphere enclosing the particular planetary atmospheres. Anderson might also have presented a natural philosopher speculating about an alternative universe where the planets were instead separated by the Lucretian void. Anderson's vast corpus of works enables us to speculate about how he might have contributed to later trends in sf.

More On Mars

Poul Anderson has an ambiguous relationship to Mars. On the one hand, he is not among the main known writers about Mars or Martians. In this connection, over a dozen names come to mind before Anderson's. On the other hand, as this blog showed earlier this month, Anderson created over half a dozen different versions of Martians. And he would almost certainly have contributed to GRR Martin's and Gardner Dozois' Old Mars if he had still been alive when this anthology of original stories was being compiled.

In his eloquent and evocative Introduction, "Red Planet Blues," Martin refers to an amalgam or consenus vision of Mars emerging from many authors' imaginations. This vision is strengthened by an anthology that presents fifteen new original versions. The opening story, "Martian Blood" by Allen M Steele, has a humanly habitable Mars with tall, dark-skinned, humanoid natives whose similarities to Terrestrials are to be explained either by parallel evolution or by panspermia.

 I gather from SM Stirling's story, "Swords of Zar-tu-Kan," that Phobos seen from Mars would be a third the size of the Moon seen from Earth (I thought smaller) and that Deimos would be seen to crawl past it (I thought that ERB had got it wrong about either moon moving visibly).

There was a time before scientific writing and science fiction about Mars had separated. The astronomer Lowell mapped canals and oases and wrote about civilization irrigating deserts with water from the poles - as, following Lowell, did Edgar Rice Burroughs. There have been three stages of Martian sf:

Old Mars;
New (Mariner) Mars;
retro-Mars.

Sf writers have realized that they were not obliged to confine their fiction to the astronomical universe. Poul Anderson wrote mainly about New Mars but would have embraced, and surpassed at, retro-Mars if this third trend had started sooner.

Following Lines Of Thought

(I just did watch that Sin City dvd mentioned earlier. See here.)

We have had more posts on this blog today than I expected. One thought leads to another. Discussion of one Martian novel led to a discussion of Martian fiction in general which then led to brief posts on Venus, Jupiter and Mercury, sometimes interrupted by (I hope interesting) reports on local Lancastrian life.

I never know what is coming next. There has to be an angle but, as soon as there is an angle, there is always plenty to say or draw attention to. After a long stretch of reading prose, I like to escape into graphic fiction because the latter is visual as well as verbal. That means temporarily leaving Poul Anderson or SM Stirling for, e.g., Alan Moore, hence a recent link.

The present dilemma is whether to stay with Swamp Thing or return to ...Crimson Kings tonight. Either way, I will finish ...Crimson Kings soon and will receive the remaining "Lords of Creation" installment in September. Waterstones Bookshop tell me that they will get the Old Mars anthology merely because GRR Martin's name is on the cover...