Thursday, 15 November 2018

A Freakishly Huge Moon

See Large Moons.

"Without a freakishly huge moon like Luna to stabilize it, the spin axis of an otherwise Earthlike planet was apt to wander chaotically, with consequences falling anywhere between a runaway glaciation and a runaway greenhouse."
-Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars (New York, 1998), 1, p. 9.

Large moons could become another blog theme like the Milky Way:

"Milky Way and stars beswarmed blackness."
-Poul Anderson, Harvest Of Stars (London, 1993), 61, p. 518.

"In the darkness above shone red Proxima, amber Sol, a purity of radiance that was Phaeton. Encompassing them were stars in their thousands and the countlessness of the galaxy."
-ibid., 63, pp. 530-531.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Or sometimes terrestroid planets might become the moons of gas giants, As Atlantis was of Minos in VIRGIN PLANET.

Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

Earth seems to have frozen from pole to pole at least once.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Mr. Stirling!

I remember a TV show discussing how that seems to have happened. I thought just now of the partially glaciated Altai in Anderson's story "A Message In Secret." Or Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn's novel FALLEN ANGELS (about a new Ice Age coming to Earth).

Sean