Tuesday 9 June 2015

...Or Jupiter

After Mars and Venus, Jupiter must be the most frequently fictionalized of planets:

ERB's John Carter and one of Clifford Simak's dogs wind up on Jupiter;

the exploration of Jupiter is described in a short story by Arthur C Clarke (title?) and in another by James Blish, the latter incorporated into Blish's Cities In Flight future history.

However, the master of Jovian fiction must be Poul Anderson:

in Three Worlds To Conquer, Jupiter is inhabited by three rational species, two separated by an ammonia ocean, the third living so high in the atmosphere that it is rarely glimpsed and regarded as supernatural;

in "Call Me Joe," Jupiter is colonized by intelligent artificial organisms;

in the History of Technic Civilization, Jupiter, visited by Dominic Flandry, is colonized by extrasolars;

in the Flying Mountains future history, asteroid colonists mine the Jovian atmosphere;

in the Psychotechnic History, a disabled spaceship floats in the Jovian atmosphere.

The reader notices that some of these fictional Jupiters have a solid surface whereas others do not. A very observant reader might notice that one of Anderson's Jovians and one of his Martians have the same name.

1 comment:

Jim Baerg said...

The Clarke story is "A Meeting With Medusa", collected in "The Wind From The Sun".