Originally published on Poul Anderson Appreciation, 24 Aug 2013.
According
to Wikipedia, Mercury's day equals two of its years. Until 1965, every
time Mercury was observed, it was showing the same face towards Earth,
so it was thought that the planet had a hot day side always facing the
Sun and a cold night side always turned away. Any science fiction
written before that date assumes this.Then, in 1965, radar observations
disclosed that Mercury in fact rotates three times for every two
revolutions.
Thus, the opening story of Larry Niven's
Known Space future history became scientifically out of date between
writing and publication. The hot and cold sides of Mercury are a myth of
the Solar System like the canals of Mars and the oceans of Venus.
I have started to read Poul Anderson's "Vulcan's Forge" (Space Folk,
New York, 1989), set on and around Mercury but published in 1983. Thus,
this is a modern Mercury with a sunrise. Both title and text refer to
another myth, Vulcan. Anomalies in Mercury's orbit were once explained
by postulating another planet even closer to the Sun and appropriately
named "Vulcan." Then the anomalies were instead explained by relativity.
Inappropriately, the name "Vulcan" was later transferred to a
fictitious extra-solar planet in Star Trek. In the first volume of his prose adaptations of Star Trek scripts, James Blish rightly describes this nomenclature as confusing.
Italicized
passages in "Vulcan's Forge" are narrated by what seems to be a human
consciousness directly controlling a spaceship approaching "Vulcan". It
was known in 1983 that the postulated Solar planet Vulcan did not exist
so I have yet to learn how Anderson is using the term here. Meanwhile,
here is another of Anderson's unusual words: "...cabochons..." (p. 30).
No comments:
Post a Comment