Thursday 13 February 2020

The Old Solar System

Sf written before some arbitrary date features habitable/inhabited solar planets, e.g.:

ERB
Otis Adelbert Kline
HG Wells
Olaf Stapledon
Ray Bradbury
CS Lewis
Leigh Brackett
Edmond Hamilton
CL Moore
Robert Heinlein's Future History and some of his Juveniles
the early Isaac Asimov

Poul Anderson has:

a colonized Venus in Time Patrol;
different Martian races in several works;
a terraformed and colonized Venus in the Technic History;
Jovians in Three Worlds To Conquer.

The old Solar System is revived in retro-sf by SM Stirling and in, e.g., Old Mars - a variant of alternative history.

6 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And in "Sister Planet," Poul Anderson gave us an oceanic Venus with intelligent like. And an inhabited Mars with an advanced civilization in THE WAR OF TWO WORLDS. Both written before about 1960, when advances in our knowledge of those planets disappointed the old hopes of those worlds having either intelligent life or of being terrestroid.

Ad astra! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

The blogger does not remember everything but that is what the combox is for.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And you have done the same for me, correcting mistakes I've made! (Smiles)

Ad astra! Sean

S.M. Stirling said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
S.M. Stirling said...

The Venus of the Time Patrol series is referred to as terraformed, by the scientists of the First Scientific Renaissance, IIRC.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Mr. Stirling!

And Jerry Pournelle's article, "The Big Rain," a very Andersonian title, suggest ways on how we could try to actually terraform Venus! And Robert Zubrin does the same in his book THE CASE FOR SPACE.

Ad astra! Sean