In fact:
THE LUNAR PROJECT WAS OBLIGATORY WORK, BUT KOROLEV WAS DREAMING OF MARS, VENUS, AND JUPITER
Now that new aspects of the Soviet rocket and spacecraft chief designer’s biography are being uncovered, it is becoming increasingly clear that Korolev was the staunchest supporter of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s dictum: “Humankind will not stay on Earth forever but, in pursuit of light and space, it will first timidly go beyond the bounds of the atmosphere and then will conquer the entire solar system.”
-copied from here. (An article entitled: "We will conquer the universe.")
(ii) Flash Gordon "conquered the universe" in a cinema serial. See here.
(iii) CS Lewis wrote that:
"[Weston] was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over our planet in obscure works of 'scientification', in little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs, and between the covers of monstrous magazines, ignored or mocked by the intellectuals, but ready, if ever the power is put into its hands, to open a new chapter of misery for the universe. It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a wider area: that the vast astronomical distances, which are God's quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond this lies the sweet poison of the false infinite - the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy, can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species - a dream begotten by the hatred of death upon the fear of true immortality, fondled in secret by thousands of ignorant men and hundreds who are not ignorant. The destruction or enslavement of other species in the universe, if such there are, is to these minds a welcome corollary."
-CS Lewis, Perelandra IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 145-348 AT 6, p. 216.
(Get a grip, Lewis!)
(iv) "...the Imperials everywhere refrained from offensive action. They worked at digging in where they were and at building up their conquest until it could not merely defend itself, it could lift an irresistible fist above all Avalon."
-Poul Anderson, The People Of The Wind IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 437-662 AT XVII, p. 632.
(v) "...[Flandry] was lonesome among his fellow conquerors..."
-Poul Anderson, "The Game of Glory" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 303-339 AT I, p. 306.
"Scientifiction" (not "scientification") features interplanetary conquerors who are sometimes Terrestrial. Do I have a point here? Just that the word, "conquer," has different meanings.
10 comments:
Paul:
Someone by the unlikely name of "Stirling" wrote a series in which the hero unified his planet, bringing an end to the incessant wars that'd swept it since the breakdown of interstellar civilization. A prediction of the future by the computer that'd advised this hero included the image of a monument to him, inscribed, "Raj Whitehall. The Conqueror of Peace." In the background of the vision, a starship was taking off.
David,
Thank you and what is the name of this series?
Paul.
Paul:
It's The General, and my wisecrack about "unlikely name" referred to the fact that the author is the same S.M. Stirling on so many of whose works you've commented here. It was written in collaboration with David Drake; that is, Mr. Drake wrote extensive outlines which Mr. Stirling then expanded into five novels (followed by two sequels).
David,
Thank you. That might be the sf work that I read next.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And I absolutely disagree with C.S. Lewis' hostility to the idea of mankind someday leaving this Earth to settle other worlds!
Ditto, what David said about Drake/Stirling's THE GENERAL books. I hope you soon look them up.
Sean
We had fun with those, and our styles merged well. Though Dave outlines much more than I do -- he writes 40,000 word outlines for his own work, and did the same for those books.
It was oddly liberating. I didn't have to wonder about what came next, just do the scenes as well as I could and fill in the details.
Infectious enthusiasm. I will have to read those books after I have finished reading or rereading a bunch of others.
Paul:
A sort of preface by David Drake to the second book in the series describes briefly how he put together the outline for the first, and then states the following:
"Then it was Steve's turn. I waited nervously. I'd invested a great deal of myself as well as my time in that outline, and one thing I was sure was that the finished novel wouldn't be quite the way I would have written it.
"I was wrong: The Forge is exactly the way I would have written it, if I'd had Steve's knowledge base in addition to my own. The Forge is quite simply one of the best novels to bear my name—but the main credit for that goes to Steve Stirling, who translated my outline into life and vibrancy."
So there you have it: a rave review from somebody with a far more personal stake than most reviewers.
David,
There are as many ways of collaborating as there are pairs of collaborators. I think I read that Pohl and Kornbluth took it in turns to write 200-word sections of the text of a novel.
Paul.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I greatly enjoyed THE GENERAL books that you co-authored with Dave Drake. Almost the only criticism I would make is that I thought the time taken for entire story in those five books, about five years in Bellevue years, too short. I thought taking at least ten Bellevue years would have made the story seemed a bit less "rushed."
Sean
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