Clifford Simak's Jupiter, Part II

(Today, we have just seen a partial solar eclipse which seemed to me an anticlimax.)

We have reread to the end of Clifford Simak's "Desertion." Thus, of the four Jupiter narratives that were to be discussed, only those by Poul Anderson and James Blish remain to be reread to the end.

Like Anderson and Blish, Simak describes the Jovian environment as a perpetual maelstrom where the prevalent liquid is not water but ammonia. Like Anderson, Simak concludes his narrative with human minds in Jovian bodies happy to live on Jupiter. Unlike Anderson and Blish, Simak proposes not ice as a construction material but metal with increased electronic tension enclosed in tough quartz to protect it from the ammonia rain. 

Simak's characters possess  a technology that enables them to "convert" a human body into an organism able to live on another planet, then to re-convert that body back into human form! - so why are human explorers confined inside domes on the Jovian surface when they sound as if they are already Lords of Creation? Well, their conquest of Jupiter is delayed by the fact that those who are converted and released find their new existence so paradisal that they do not want to  return and do not even communicate this information to anyone else so that it seems to those back in the dome that the "converted" have been sent to their deaths. (In CS Lewis' "Forms of Things Unknown," several men in succession are sent to the Moon and do not return but, in that case, the reason is deadly.)

Anderson's character on Jupiter has to struggle to survive. He does not find himself in a paradise. But Anderson and Simak are a hard and a soft sf writer, respectively. (Lewis also "soft.")