On Babur

Mirkheim, V.

Babur is much bigger than Earth but its seas are smaller because:

"Ammonia is less plentiful than water." (p. 91)

Continents are enormous and their interiors arid with sparse black vegetation, glittering dust and no habitation. The metallic core is surrounded by strata of rock and ice, the latter hot, compressed and liable to explode when the pressure eases. Lands sink. Others, newly upheaved, shudder with quakes and are not immediately touched by life. Houses of ice are anchored against storms. Cities cannot grow high and must spread wide. Buildings are aerodynamic. Spaceships, unsafe on the surface, must touch down in silos. Nice place. Sounds more like Hell. In terms of human habitability, Babur is intermediate between Earth and Jupiter and maybe corresponds to older ideas of Jupiter, as in Poul Anderson's Three Worlds To Conquer? That Jupiter still had a solid surface and a distinction between globe and atmosphere whereas the more recently understood Jupiter, as shown in Anderson's "Hunters of the Sky Cave," is composed of deeper layers of turbulent gas all the way down to a dense core.