Sf characters spend a lot of their time either inside spaceships or on planetary surfaces but we also like to know about the regions and volumes of space that they move through. The unnamed narrator of Poul Anderson's "The Master Key"(here) mentions a planet with a king and minarets and another with ammonia in the atmosphere but does not tell us where they are. However, the story does impart some minimal galactographic information.
"The last I'd heard of Harry's oldest son, he was an apprentice aboard one of Van Rijn's ships, somewhere in the Hercules region." (p. 117)
When the narrator is introduced to Manuel Felipe Gomez y Palomares from Nuevo Mexico, he:
"...introduced myself with great formality, according to what I knew of customs of those poor and haughty colonists from the far side of Arcturus." (p. 118)
A competitor with "'...the ethics of a paranoid weasel...'" (p. 120), according to van Rijn, has employed spies to try to locate the potentially lucrative planet, Cain. Harry Stenvik's oldest son, Per, comments:
"'I'd better not mention the coordinates myself. It's out Pegasus way. A G-nine dwarf star, about half as luminous as Sol. Eight planets, one of them terrestroid.'" (ibid.)
After that, the details are about the planet itself. This planetary system and some other fictional ones sound like duplicates of the Solar System. Since then, vastly variant exo-systems have been discovered.
(Spot the error in the blurb if it is legible.)
4 comments:
The error I notice is "stellar trader" rather than "inter-stellar trader".
Kaor, Paul!
The error I think you had in mind was that blurb calling Old Nick a 21st century trader, when he should be thought of as living in the 25th/26th centuries.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean spotted the error that I had.
Back when Poul was writing, we had a sample of exactly one solar system to work from!
There were convincing theories about why smaller rocky planets would be closer in... which turned out not to be true, and planetary systems turned out to be weirder than we could have imagined.
Mind you, we're still not quite there when it comes to detecting planets as small as Earth.
We'll get there soon, what with the cost of launch coming down so fast. Pretty soon space-based telescopes weighing hundreds of tons will be common as dirt.
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