Stapledon's Fifth Men exterminate the Venerians while colonizing Venus.
Lewis' demonically possessed Weston arrives on Perelandra/Venus shortly after the angelically propelled Ransom.
The crew of Robert Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo find a Nazi base on the Moon.
In Heinlein's Destination Moon, the lunar explorers film an already established based, possibly Russian or alien, on the Moon.
Heinlein's D.D. Harriman, "The Man Who Sold The Moon," cites the threat of Russian rockets based on the Moon in order to sell his own lunar colonization project. Later, the Space Patrol monopolizes nuclear weapons and a clique within the Patrol attempts a coup.
Blish's Colonials exterminate the Vegans.
Poul Anderson's mutants find hostile Siberians on Mars.
In Anderson's "Kings Who Die," two superpowers fight in space instead of on Earth.
Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium exports militarism and imperialism to the stars.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Your mention of ROCKET SHIP GALILEO interests me. I'm not sure I ever read that Heinlein book. And the idea of a Nazi base on the Moon is intriguing.
As for "Kings Who Die," recall Stirling recent comments about how the existence of nuclear weapons made it too risky for either the US or USSR to attempt a show down clash on Earth. But space would be another matter! I can imagine space navies sometimes combating each other, as a safer alternative to fighting on Earth.
As for Pournelle's Co-Dominium series, "militarism and imperialism" are simply part of how human beings behave.
Sean
The problem with fighting in space instead is that if you don't live there, nothing that happens there can be fundamentally decisive on Earth, and if you do live there, the same constraints apply as on earth.
I think most of the examples in the original post are simply examples of human beings going other places but continuing to be human beings.
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