Sunday 10 March 2013

Jupiter


Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison edited Farewell, Fantastic Venus, containing "The Big Rain," from the Psychotechnic future history, and "Sister Planet," a non-series story, by Poul Anderson. Logically, this anthology should also have contained "Logic of Empire" by Robert Heinlein but Aldiss, in a bar conversation at an sf con forty three years ago, quoted Heinlein as saying, "You can't have 'Logic of Empire.' It's part of my Future History!'"

There could be a similar, though perhaps shorter, anthology for Jupiter, containing at least:

"Bridge" by James Blish, part of the Cities In Flight future history;
"Desertion" by Clifford Simak, part of the City future history;
"Skeleton Men of Jupiter" by Edgar Rice Burroughs, part of the John Carter series;
"Call Me Joe" by Poul Anderson, non-series.

Arthur C Clarke wrote a short story about a cyborg exploring a gas giant but I cannot remember what it was called, where it was published or which gas giant it was.

Anderson also touched on Jupiter in:

"Hunters of the Sky Cave," part of the Technic Civilization future history;
"Que Donn'rez Vous?," part of the Flying Mountains future history;
Three Worlds To Conquer, non-series -

- so an Anderson Jupiter collection could be compiled from these works.

It is on my agenda to reread "Call Me Joe." "Desertion" is similar but lacks Anderson's grasp of science. Simak's characters can transform a human body into a Jovian body and back again, which can only mean destroying a human body, creating a Jovian body with the human body's memories, then reversing the process. If they command that much knowledge and energy, then surely they do not need to send transformed beings to explore the Jovian environment?

2 comments:

Jim Baerg said...

There is an Arthur C. Clarke story fitting your memory called "A Meeting with Medusa" which I have in the collection "The Wind from the Sun".
In the story it is a Cyborg exploring Jupiter, & the cyborg states that the other gas giants can be explored by non-cyborgs since their gravities are similar to earth gravity while Jupiter's gravity is about 2.5 earth gravity.

BTW there is a curious clustering of the values of surface gravity for solar system bodies. They tend to cluster near values that differ by ratios of 2.5 or 0.4 depending on whether you are going up or down in value.
See the table in this paper which points out this oddity.
http://www.gdnordley.com/_files/Gravity.pdf

Even if this is only a coincidence, it is relevant to space travel & settlement since we only need to test the effects of martian & lunar gravity on human health, since that will also tell us what we need to know for the gravity on Mercury & all the 6 largest moons in the solar system

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Jim!

Anderson seems to have thought, if we go by THE GAME OF EMPIRE, that humans would find planets with gravities 30 percent greater than Earth's as much as they would or could tolerate.

Ad astra! Sean