Friday, 3 April 2026

SF Questions And Answers II

We have recently reread Welcome To Mars by James Blish and Out Of The Silent Planet and "Ministering Angels" by CS Lewis, each set on a different version of Mars. An explorer eats some Martian vegetation with lethal results in the Lewis short story but with beneficial results in the Blish novel. 

Several passages or entire narratives by Poul Anderson are set on alternative versions of Mars.

Both "Ministering Angels" and Anderson's "The Saturn Game" address long term psychological consequences of space travel.

In Anderson's Ensign Flandry, the Terran Empire maintains a Naval base on the planet Starkad and:

"Madame Cepheid had patriotically dispatched a shipful of girls and croupiers to Starkad."
-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, January 2010), pp. 1-192 AT CHAPTER TWO, p. 19.

"Ministering Angels" features an ill-conceived early attempts to address such needs of spacemen in bases on other planets.

See also:


In the above, notice Heinlein's three acronyms. Lewis adds another:

"'...Woman's Higher Aphrodisio-Therapeutic Humane Organization (abbreviated WHAT-HO)...'"
-CS Lewis, "Ministering Angels" IN Lewis, The Dark Tower and other stories (London, 1983), pp. 112-123 AT p. 116.

It is a long way from "Ministering Angels" to Ensign Flandry but both are examples of speculative fiction. 
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1 comment:

  1. Anonymous4 April 2026 at 05:36

    Kaor, Paul!

    Of course, we have to expect plant and animal life forms on other worlds to sometimes/often being poisonous to human beings.

    Ha! Not in the least surprised by what Madame Cepheid did. As Flandry once said, prostitution is one of two oldest professions, something that can only be managed, not eliminated. It's What Human Beings Do.

    I was reminded of my article, "Futuristic Sex."

    Ad astra! Sean

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