The old symbols are useful. They were being saved in their preserve in Never-never land for a purpose. They are not going to be discarded. Instead, grounds are gradually being made for their existence in the new World Beyond the Hill.
As early as the Fifties, spacemen out on colonial survey set down on strange planets and discovered that the leprechauns had gotten there first. From that, we might have guessed that eventually it would be possible to discover all of the old symbols in the new World Beyond the Hill. If you like, the materials of our complete universe must include all that has ever been meaningful to us. Or, if you like otherwise, when the magical world discovered that the plumbing was in place, it moved into its new home.
So another trend is explained—the continuing merger of traditional fantasy into modern science fiction. The excursions into "mythology" by Zelazny, Swann, and others that marked the middle Sixties were in fact a concentration on the accommodation of potential traditional symbols to modern sf and the new World Beyond the Hill. In Lord of Light, Zelazny was welcoming the symbol of Buddha to the future and a distant planet. If Buddha and leprechauns can exist in the new World Beyond the Hill, what can be denied access?
A prize-winning 1971 story by Poul Anderson, "The Queen of Air and Darkness," is addressed to this process. In this story, seeming fairyland is discovered on another planet, is denied and exposed. Now, James Blish might describe this story as an acceptable variant on an old idea. Anderson himself might say that it demonstrates the pain in the exposure of cherished illusion. But we would describe the story as one testing the ability of traditional fantasy symbols to exist on far planets. And what is most interesting to us is that the fairyland was more convincing than its exposure. In fact, Anderson's characters saw a true fairyland but were too rationalistic to accept it. It was true fairyland. There is no reason that it shouldn't have been.
The problem of sf now that its full symbolic vocabulary is available is to learn to use the vocabulary, not just to extend it. To this point, we haven't found the handle on our invention. We writers haven't found our vocation yet. We don't know what we are good for. We do know that we are good for something serious, so for the past ten years we have tried our best to be serious.
We tried being mythological. But Roger Zelazny could not be serious about the Buddha. Being "mythological" didn't prove to be a serious enterprise.
Then we tried copying serious mimetic models. John Brunner tried writing like Dos Passos. And Brian Aldiss tried writing like the French antinovel and James Joyce. But the results did not justify continued serious attention after their considerable initial novelty. Aldiss's Cryptozoic will not be reprinted even as often as Zelazny's The Dream Master. We won't want to see the book again in years to come.
Most recently, like so much of the common stir in the world around us, we have been experimenting with decadence. Decadence is a very self-dramatizing way of being serious. We seem to feel serious in this way just now throughout the culture. The stories of Robert Silverberg and Barry Malzberg may be the equivalent of Alice Cooper, David Bowie, and the Rolling Stones. Or the equivalent of movies like A Clockwork Orange or Last Tango in Paris. Decadence is a mood that grips the entire culture, not just sf. It is a way of expressing frustration with the limitations of the conscious.
It isn't necessary for sf to express frustration with the limitations of the conscious. We might alternatively say that sf doesn't have to concern itself with crazy, frustrated Anglo-Saxon astronaut schlepps in the shambles of some near-future version of the Apollo program. One of us is even the author of a story like this that expressed our feelings one winter, so Barry Malzberg is not alone. If we only knew where the handle on sf was, we should have had much more to talk about than we presently do.
When we have learned how to be serious with symbols like spaceships and ray guns and telepathy and alternate dimensions, then "serious" stories like Cryptozoic and Beyond Apollo will seem symptomatic of the 1970 mind, when we didn't know what was going on and were very frustrated. Any time that we can write this narrowly and grant the possibility of only this little, while we sit amidst a wide availability of symbolic vocabulary, we must be frustrated in our seriousness.
This is true, of course, of us within our society as well. We are living narrowly and granting the possibility of little while we sit amidst a wealth of tools that have never been properly used. And all we can do is watch our friends make sick nasty criticisms in parody before the eyes of the conscious world. As in our minds, so in the world of our experience. As in our stories, so in the world of our experience.
Because, you see, if you really believed in the unknown world that surrounds the known, which you will do if and when writers begin to find out how to write about it seriously again, then you would look around at the contemporary multiplicity—and isn't there a lot of it—and you would put it together in new ways that you can't think of now because your unconscious is unavailable to you now. Whatever television ultimately is, it isn't anything like the purposes for which it has been used so far. But you haven't yet found the connective that makes sense of television and all the other trends of modern life. You will be more likely to as your unconscious becomes available to you.
We expect the next trend, when our period of acting out the end of the old line is over after perhaps another two years, to be a period of fragmentation of a further three or four years— lasting to about 1978 or 1979. It will be a period of private search, private experimentation, and personal solution much more markedly than it is now, behind the facade of decadence. Audiences will be smaller. Tastes will be more personal. But, particularly in retrospect, we will be able to see that among all the apparent experimentation for experimentation's sake, much of which will have seemed awfully goddamned frivolous, some was in fact serious. Truly serious.
In 1978 or 1979, we'll pause to think about this. Things will be less varied and lively for a while. The experiments will seem to have come to an end. And we will have run the old stuff to its very last breath. But then, we will look back over the experiments of 1976 and decide that some of them look pretty good. And, if we were to take their conclusions as premises, what then?
What then will prove to be another creative explosion, beginning perhaps around 1980. This creative explosion will be much greater in impact than the creative explosions that occurred in 1939-1941 and again in 1964-1968.
Everything in this description should be true of sf as it is of the culture as a whole. Once again.
After 1980, traditional fantasy will have become comfortably integrated in modern sf—speculative fantasy. The audience for speculative fantasy will be multiplied larger than its present size. Speculative fantasy itself will be radically altered in character. It will be something new and truly serious, and more enjoyable than it has ever been.
Alexei and Cory Panshin
Alexei Panshin was born in Lansing, Michigan, in 1940. He has attended schools in Michigan,
Massachusetts and Illinois, and elsewhere, and has taught at Cornell University. He began to write in 1958. In 1969, his novel Rite of Passage won the Science Fiction Writers of America Nebula Award. In that same year, he married Cory Panshin and their work is now done in collaboration. Cory Panshin was born in New York City in 1947 and was graduated from Radcliffe College.
Heinlein in Dimension, 1968 (Advent)
Rite of Passage, 1968 (Ace)
Star Well, 1968 (Ace)
The Thurb Revolution, 1968 (Ace)
Masque World, 1969 (Ace)
Poul Anderson
The Creation of Imaginary Worlds: The World Builder's Handbook and Pocket Companion
This is an infinitely marvelous and beautiful universe which we are privileged to inhabit. Look inward to the molecules of life and the heart of the atom, or outward to moon, sun, planets, stars, the Orion Nebula where new suns and worlds are coming into being even as you watch, the Andromeda Nebula which is actually a whole sister galaxy: it is all the same cosmos, and every part of it
is part of us. The elements of our flesh, blood, bones, and breath were forged out of hydrogen in stars long vanished. The gold in a wedding ring, the uranium burning behind many a triumphantly ordinary flick of an electric light switch, came out of those gigantic upheavals we call supernovas. It is thought that inertia itself, that most fundamental property of matter, would be meaningless—nonexistent—were there no stellar background to define space, time, and motion. Man is not an accident of chaos; nor is he the sum and only significance of creation. We belong here.
Once literature recognized this simple fact. Lightnings blazed around Lear; Ahab sailed an enormous ocean and Huck Finn went down a mighty river; McAndrew saw God in the machinery which man created according to the laws of the universe. But this is seldom true any longer. Barring a few, today's fashionable writers are concerned exclusively with Man, capitalized and isolated—who usually turns out to be a hypersensitive intellectual, capitalized and isolated among his own hangups. This is not necessarily bad, but may it not be a little bit limited?
In science fiction, whatever its faults, we have a medium which still allows exploration of a wider, more varied field. Of course, the story with a highly detailed extraterrestrial background is by no means the sole kind of science fiction. It is not even in the majority. Nor should it be. Too much of any one theme would put the reader right back into the monotony from which he hoped to escape.
However, when a story does take its characters beyond Earth, he is entitled to more than what he so often gets. This is either a world exactly like our own except for having neither geography nor history, or else it is an unbelievable mishmash which merely shows us that still another writer couldn't be bothered to do his homework.
As an example of the latter category, John Campbell once cited the awful example of a planet circling a blue-white sun and possessing an atmosphere of hydrogen and fluorine. This is simply a chemical impossibility. Those two substances, under the impetus of that radiation, would unite promptly and explosively. Another case is that of a world which is nothing but sterile desert, devoid of plant life, yet has animals and air that men can breathe. Where does the food chain begin? What maintains an equilibrium of free oxygen?
At the very least, a well-thought-out setting goes far toward adding artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. By bringing in this detail and that, tightly linked, the writer makes his imaginary globe seem real. Furthermore, the details are interesting in their own right. They may reveal something of the possibilities in their own right. They may reveal something of the possibilities in these light-years that surround us, thereby awakening the much-desired sense of wonder. Finally, many of them will suggest important parts of the plot.
In the most highly developed cases, they practically become the story. Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity is a classic of this kind. But enchanting though it is, that sort of thing is reserved for writers who have the necessary scientific training.
What I wish to show here is that others can do likewise, in a more modest but nevertheless astonishingly thorough fashion. It doesn't take a degree in physics. It simply takes the basic knowledge of current scientific fact and theory which any person must have before he can properly—in this day and age—call himself educated. In addition, it requires imagination and a willingness to work; but these are qualities that every writer worth his salt already possesses. Anyhow, "work" is the wrong word, if that suggests drudgery. The designing of a planet is fascinating—sheer fun.
Because it is, I believe most readers would also enjoy seeing a few of the principles spelled out.
They involve mathematics, and equations are their natural form of expression. But too many people are unreasonably puzzled, even frightened, by equations. Those who aren't will already know the natural laws I refer to; or they can be trusted to look them up. So instead I shall offer a few graphs.[121 With their help, and just the tiniest bit of arithmetic, anyone should be able to start world-building on his own.
Needless to say, any serious effort of this kind demands more information than can possibly be squeezed into the present essay. Two reference books that are especially well suited to science fiction purposes and are, in addition, a joy to read are: Intelligent Life in the Universe by I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan (Holden Day, 1966) and Habitable Planets for Man by Stephen H. Dole (Elsevier, rev. ed., 1970). Of course, there are numerous other good works available.
Like every living science, astronomy today is in a state of continuous revolution. Any book is virtually certain to contain outdated material; and "facts" are always subject to change without notice.
(Indeed, as I write, the whole set of methods by which the distances and thus the properties of other galaxies have been obtained, is being called into question.) I have no desire to be dogmatic. If I sometimes appear that way in what follows, it is merely to save space. Take for granted that every statement bears a qualifier like: "This is my limited understanding of what the best contemporary thought on the subject seems to be."
Yet let us never forget that it is the best thought available. If we don't use it, we will have no basis whatsoever on which to reason.
Therefore, onward! Mainly we'll consider some of the possibilities regarding planets which, without being copies of Earth, are not as absolutely different from it as are the other members of our own Solar System. Anything more exotic, a la Hal Clement, would take us too far afield. Besides, more often than not, a writer wants a world where his humans can survive without overly many artificial aids.
A number of parameters determine what such a globe will be like. They include the kind of sun and orbit it has, the size and mass, axial tilt and rotation, satellites—to name a few of the more obvious. Doubtless there are several more which science has thus far not identified. Our knowledge of these things is less than complete. But simply by varying those parameters we do know about, we can produce a huge variety of environments for stories to happen in. We can also gain, and give to our readers, some feeling for the subtlety and interrelatedness of nature and her laws.
Normally we begin by picking a star, real or imaginary. In earlier days, science fiction customarily put planets around the familiar ones like Sirius, Vega, Antares, or Mira. It was then legitimate enough, if a trifle repetitious. But today we know, or believe we know, that few of the naked-eye stars will serve.
Mostly they are giants, visible to us only because they are so brilliant that we can pick them out across immense gulfs of space. (Sol would no longer be discernible without instruments at a distance of about 55 light-years.) Now the red giants like Antares, the variables like Mira, are dying stars, well on their way to the dim, ultra-dense white-dwarf condition. If ever they had planets—their mass makes that unlikely, as we will see in a minute—the inner attendants have been seared or even consumed, as these suns expanded. If outer globes have been warmed up, this won't last long enough to do biological evolution any good.
Probably the majority of stars in the universe are still enjoying health. Their temperatures and luminosities vary enormously. The most important reason for this is the difference in their masses. The more massive a sun is, the more intensely compressed it becomes at its core, and thus the more fierce and rapid are the thermonuclear reactions which cause it to shine. This dependence of output on mass is a highly sensitive one, so that the latter covers a much smaller range than the former.
These stars form a well-defined series, from the largest and brightest to the smallest and dimmest, which is called the main sequence. For historical reasons, spectrographers label the types O, B, A, F, G, K, M. (The mnemonic is "Oh, be a fine girl, kiss me") The series being continuous, a number is added to place each star more exactly on the curve. For example, the F types begin with FQ; then we get F^
F2, and so on through F9, which is followed by GQ. That last, GQ, was formerly the classification of our own sun; but more recent information has gotten Sol to be labeled G2.
Figure 1 shows a large part of th
e main sequence. It omits the extremes, because they really are too extreme to diagram very well. That is, the main sequence runs from the hottest Type O blue giants, some as much as a million times the strength of Sol, on through the yellowish F and G stars, to the red dwarfs of Class M, the dimmest of which may be less than a thousandth as intense as our daystar. Types are indicated along the bottom of the graph, with corresponding masses. Luminosities— necessarily on a logarithmic scale—are shown going up the left-hand side.
FlG'1 Mass (Sol11) and Spectral typ-e
From this, you can find the mass corresponding to a given brightness. It will only be a rough estimate; but then, the real values don't lie neatly on an infinitely thin curve. They vary by a fair amount, depending on such factors as the age and exact chemical composition of the individual star.
More is involved than just the total radiation. As everyone knows who has ever heated a piece of metal in a fire, temperature affects color. The hottest stars are called blue giants because they are not only giants in output, but also their light contains a distinctly larger proportion of blue than does that of Sol. They also emit a higher percentage, as well as absolute amount, of ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths; and no doubt the solar winds streaming from them are something terrific. All these quantities drop off as temperature does, until we get to the cool, ultraviolet-poor red dwarfs. (However, the weaker ones among these last are not mere embers. Sometimes they spit out monstrous flares which may temporarily double the total brightness—a fact which I used in a story once but on which I have no copyright.)
Well, shall we put our imaginary world in orbit around one of the spectacular giants?
Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow Page 25