An Embarrassment Of Riches

While still rereading Poul Anderson's Fire Time, I have started to reread Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire and have also received SM Stirling's The Sky People (New York, 2006) from Amazon. (It should have been Stirling's Dies The Fire.)

Stirling harks back to the kind of inhabited Venus that Stapledon, Burroughs, Heinlein, Anderson and others wrote of in previous decades. Stirling's way of doing this is to locate his inhabited Venus in an alternative timeline, thus combining interplanetary adventure in an inhabited Solar System with a different, usually unrelated, sf concept.

Stirling's "Acknowledgments" refer to:

John Carter (of course);
Northwest Smith (I recognize the name);
"Wrong Way" Carson of Venus.

Did ERB call Carson Napier "'Wrong Way' Carson"? In any case, he did go the wrong way, departing from Earth towards Mars, pulled off course by the Moon, falling towards the Sun, then landing on Venus - celestial acrobatics almost as implausible as Carter's astral projection. Since ERB's Martians knew of intelligent beings on Mercury, since Carter traveled from Mars to a Martian moon, then to Jupiter, and since later space travelers, also aiming at Mars, instead found a civilization inside Earth's Moon, ERB was well on his way towards presenting a fully inhabited Solar System - a concept that Stirling nostalgically revives, at least as regards Venus and Mars.

A metafiction is a fictional text that somehow acknowledges its fictional status. For example, a work of fiction set in an alternative timeline might obliquely refer to our version of the "real world." Stirling approaches such metafiction at the end of his Prologue when a scientist, looking at video images broadcast from Venus, exclaims:

"'A Neanderthal...What the fuck?'" (p. 6)

This could be more elegantly translated as:

"How has our timeline happened to diverge from any of the more probable timelines in which Venus either is uninhabitable or at least certainly is not inhabited by any species recognizable from Terrestrial evolution?"

However, as a first approximation, a four letter word suffices!