Thursday, 13 August 2026

On Jupiter

Hard to conceive of life out in the soupy maelstrom that was Jupiter, not knowing, of course, that through Jovian eyes it was no soupy maelstrom at all. 
The wind brushed against him with what seemed gentle fingers and he remembered with a start that by Earth standards the wind was a roaring gale, a two-hundred-mile an hour howler laden with deadly gases. Pleasant scents seeped into his body.

Poul Anderson's Edward Anglesey:

"'...I like it down there. I like being Joe...
"'What I can't put in[to my notes] is how Jupiter looks through a Jovian's infrared-seeing eyes....
"'...everything about Jupiter which is cold and poisonous and gloomy to us is right for Joe.'"

The psychologies of Anglesey and of James Blish's Robert Helmuth are (i) very different from each other and (ii) important to their stories.

Anglesey, crippled and incapacitated in his human body, is "'...strong!'" (ibid.) as Joe on Jupiter whereas Helmuth fears Jovian gravity. He anticipates and recurrently dreams that:

antigravity will be developed so that men can explore Jupiter up front;
he will feel obliged to volunteer;
the antigravity device will be a rush job, not working properly;
he will be crushed to death...

He wakes screaming from the nightmare.

A character in Blish's other future history series disposes of the idea of adapting men to live on Jupiter:

"'On worlds where only extreme modifications of the human form would make it suitable - for instance, a planet of the gas giant type - no seeding is attempted. The Council maintains that such worlds are the potential property of other races than the human, races whose psychotypes would not have to undergo radical change in order to survive there.'"
-James Blish, "Watershed" IN Blish, The Seedling Stars (London, 1972), pp. 181-192 AT p. 190.

- as in Anderson's "The Chapter Ends" where human beings and gas giant dwellers divide the Galaxy between them.

It is all one multiverse.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kaor, Paul!

I would regard the miniaturization of human beings so they could live in the puddles of the planet seen in Blish's story "Surface Tension" a very drastic modification of the human form. And an implausible "adaptation."

Ad astra! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Again, impossible. Such a small organism would not have a brain big enough to think.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Correct. I had that impossibly tiny brain in the back of my mind.

Ad astra! Sean