The Milky Way Seen From Earth

Some things are taken so much for granted that usually we do not reflect on them. For instance, Sun, Moon, stars and Milky Way are perennial parts of our environment as perceived from the Terrestrial surface where we and all our ancestors have always lived. Therefore, they are often mentioned in passing in works of literature and fiction. In fact, their creation is even described in Genesis. These heavenly bodies adopt a completely different significance in science fiction where the human environment extends outwards so that people can now inhabit bases on the Moon or Mars or even travel between the stars etc. 

It is of no interest or concern to most authors that the Moon or Mars might be inhabited. Their conceptual universe does not include anything like:

Wells' Selenities or Martians;

ERB's Moon Men or Martians;

Robert Heinlein's or Poul Anderson's several races of Martians;

many others, of course.

(Mars is the most populated planet in fiction.)

Nor do non-sf authors ask us to willingly suspend our disbelief in future dwellers on the Moon, like Anderson's Lunarians and Selenarchs. This is self-evident because any author who did treat such ideas as if they were realities would thereby become an sf author.

These observations are occasioned by finding the Milky Way in a James Bond novel:

"The Milky Way soared overhead. How many stars? Bond tried counting a finger's length and was soon past the hundred. The stars lit the sea into a faint grey road and then arched away over the tip of the mast towards the black silhouette of Jamaica."

-Ian Fleming, Dr No (London, 1958), VII, p. 63.

Of course, Bond's, and our, attention must re-descend to Earth, to the sufficiently exotic setting of Jamaica. On the following page, Bond steers by the North Star.

Poul Anderson often describes the Milky Way as seen from space or from the surface of some other planet. Bond's perception of the soaring Milky Way gives him a remote kinship with sf characters.