RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA

In the year 2130, a very large object happens through the solar system. It is so large that at first astronomers take it for an asteroid, and even give a it name, Rama, as they would for any newly discovered astronomical body.

Closer investigation of Rama reveals a startling fact. The object is a cylinder, 50 kilometers long and 20 kilometers in diameter. It is a made thing, not a natural object. Furthermore, the creatures who built it clearly had advanced technologically far beyond humankind.

Wonders increase when the survey ship visits Rama. The survey crew easily passes through the air-locks—the doors are not locked—and find an inhabitable, self-contained world in the hollow interior. But there are no signs of the intelligent life that built Rama. The crew explores the vast interior for days, but Rama remains virtually the same enigma as when first discovered.

Because Rama will pass dangerously close to the sun, the survey crew must abandon the vehicle. But before leaving, they prevent the Hermians (the human colonists on Mercury) from destroying Rama. The Hermians fear that Rama is preparing to take up a strategic orbit from which the Ramans—finally out of hiding—could control the solar system.

But Rama behaves in no way expected by humans. After rounding the sun, from which it draws energy, Rama continues on its way out of the solar system, its destination and purpose unknown to man.

In our critical attention to Rendezvous with Rama, we should first note that it is an extraordinary example of hard SF in the Vernian tradition. The giant vehicle is neither fantasy nor literary prop. It is very real, from the triple air-locks outside to the cylindrical sea inside. Further, its structure and movements are, until the last chapters, consistent with known scientific principles.

Very late in the novel, Rama shows propulsion capabilities that defy Newtonian physics (“There goes Newton’s Third Law,” one character says in disbelief). Until then, though, Rama is big, but not bigger than the potential of human understanding.

At another level, the Wellsian one, Rama is about the human reaction to an alien encounter. With considerable skill, Clarke develops in the narrative the two most elemental responses to aliens: first, that they could only want to conquer us, or, second, they will come to save us from ourselves. The first attitude we see in the Hermians, who consider Rama a threat. The second attitude we see in Boris Rodrigo, who, as a member of the Fifth Church of Christ, Cosmonaut, sees Rama as a giant ark, come to save the faithful.

As we have seen, though, Rama is neither (or reveals itself as neither). It has no apparent concern for earth, and has traveled this way entirely for its own purposes. Humans must face the possibility that they are too insignificant to be noticed, and play a very minor role in the universe.

But Rama may after all be carrying a kind of message. One of the most intriguing features of the storyline is that Rama is so unprotected from would-be vandals and predators. Do the Ramans assume that any species technologically advanced enough to reach the ship in outer space would also be respectful enough to leave it unharmed? This interpretation would link technological advancement with cultural maturity—even moral progress.

Such a theme is consistent with the tempered scientific optimism that we see in Clarke’s work throughout his career. Commander Norton, who leads the survey team, sees his role in Rama as that of a privileged caretaker. He is determined to leave the vessel in good order, and finally allows his crew to cut into one of the interior structures only after it is obvious that there is no other way to enter it.

Identifying deeply with the technological triumph that Rama represents, Norton sees a future in which humankind will someday enjoy the same achievements. His experience aboard Rama leads him to conclude that “There was mystery here—yes; but it might not be beyond human understanding.” Or, perhaps the universe is not stranger than we can know, and the universal language of intelligent life is science and technology. Rama itself—the very fact of its existence—speaks to humankind in the universal language of science.

Our appreciation of the novel takes an even richer turn if we consider closely the Hermians and their efforts to destroy Rama. Although they are considerably advanced scientifically and technologically, their behavior is hardly enlightened. The Hermians are evidence that Clarke is neither one-sided in his understanding of science, nor simple-minded in his trust of scientific advancement. It is only luck that places the right person at the right place at the right time to prevent the Hermians from destroying Rama. Furthermore, the Hermians might have been right—Rama could have been setting a strategic orbit from which it could control, militarily, the solar system. We know for certain that it isn’t only after it doesn’t.

Commander Norton acts on a “gut” instinct that Rama means no harm—and he is right. The Hermians reason from scientific logic to determine that it does mean harm—and they are wrong. Is Clarke telling us that, finally, science is subsumed in the fallible human domain, where chance, impulse, and irrationality supersede scientific logic? Is Clarke, after all, a closet humanist, speaking for the integration of “gut” instinct and scientific logic (just as many scientists insist that science is both Intellect and Passion)?

Does the Hermian’s near-success tell us anything about the Ramans themselves? We could argue that perhaps Rama after all had a defensive system; there was simply no reason to use it, since Norton and his crew took care of the Hermian threat. Or perhaps we see an ultimate naivete at the far end of the spectrum of scientific development—have the Ramans forgotten that violence is possible? Or perhaps the Ramans are fatalists—”what will be will be.” Or do they in some intuitive way “know” that a Norton will always come along to prevent vandalism?

These issues are a quantum leap beyond shoot-outs in outer space (and yet the novel is no less entertaining than good space opera), and they enrich the novel considerably. When a science fiction novel poses questions of this sort, it is on its way to becoming literature.

-Steve Anderson

Life in the Hole

There may be planets supporting life inside supermassive black holes, according to Russian cosmologist Vyacheslav Dokuchaev at Moscow’s Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences. A civilization advanced enough–a Kardashev type III, for example–to survive the unimaginably violent tidal forces inside a black hole may be able to harness the power of the singularity itself as a source of energy supply.

Area 51, Flying Saucers, and Soviet Human Experimentation: Annie Jacobsen’s New Book

Image via Wikipedia

Area 51 goes by many names – Dreamland, Paradise Ranch, Watertown, Groom Lake – and has been a part of our collective consciousness for decades. It is a melting pot of conspiracy theories, science fiction fodder, and intense government secrecy. According to some investigators, this nebulous military base nestled in the Mojave Desert is home to the truth about UFOs and alien visitations, the belief that extraterrestrials have visited the Earth. Central to that belief is that aliens crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 and their ship and bodies were taken to Area 51 to be studied and reverse engineered.

There are also assertions that inside Area 51 the US government experiments with teleportation, time travel, weather control, and exotic energy weapons.

Now there’s a new assertion, made by journalist Annie Jacobsen in her book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, that Area 51 was actually home court for the space race with the Soviets. Jacobsen claims that according to her sources, some of whom worked at Area 51, the ‘alien’ bodies recovered from Roswell were actually 13 year-old Soviet pilots who had been the victims of eugenics experiments overseen by none other than Stalin himself. The ships they were flying, actually reconnaissance vessels, were deliberately designed to look like flying saucers, so that in the case of a crash a War of the Worlds-like hysteria would be unleashed in the United States, overloading our air defense systems.

Elsewhere in the book, Jacobsen discusses Operation Plumbbob, which is the name given to a series of 29 atmospheric nuclear tests conducted in 1957. During these tests, the US military also experimented with the crash of a plutonium-loaded airplane–you know, just to see what would happen. Apparently, it’s not good.

Other experiments include:

-The conceptual development of a nuclear-powered space-based missile launch system just above the Earth’s atmosphere

-The Oxcart, a stealthy dirigible designed by the CIA to fly three times the speed of sound at 90,000 feet and used to run surveillance missions over the Soviet Union, Cuba and, later, North Vietnam and North Korea

Jacobsen’s research culminates in some pretty intense speculation about the reason Area 51 is actually classified. According to her sources, a flying saucer did indeed crash in New Mexico in 1947 and the bodies recovered from it were child-sized aviators who had been made to look like aliens as the result of human experimentation. At this time, Stalin did not yet have nuclear weapons, so the thought is that he wanted to fight President Truman with black propaganda. It is speculated that Stalin was working with sinister scientist/war criminal Joseph Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death’, fresh off his departure from Nazi Germany.

Annie Jacobsen interviewed 74 people for her book. Thirty two of them actually lived and worked at Area 51.

While it certainly ignites the imagination, as well as invoke deep sympathy for the Soviet children who were possibly the victims of human experimentation, what I’m left wondering from these assertions is what the US government learned from all this. Perhaps they gleaned a clever little trick from their Cold War nemesis, that UFO’s, and the conspiracy theory hysteria that surround them, are a great cover for nefarious military projects, both foreign and domestic.

Check out the NPR interview with Annie Jacobsen, as well as the Democracy Now interview….

-Jake Anderson

Dark Side of the Moon – b-sides

martian artifact

There’s a fella I wanna tell you about, fella by the name of Richard C. Hoagland, “hyper-dimensional” physicist and co-author of the book Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA. He believes the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is concealing the existence of extraterrestrial artifacts on the Moon and Mars.

artifacts on the moon?

Hoagland’s journey of “truth” began after completing an extensive examination of the Cydonia region of Mars, which contains the legendary Face and Giza-like pyramids (if you’ve never heard of the Face on Mars, google it with the online web Internet). Though the image of the Face was dismissed as a trick of shadow and light over two decades ago, its legacy persists in conspiracy theory circles. For Hoagland, there’s more going on than optical illusions: there’s a full-scale NASA coverup. He cites the still-unsolved disappearance of the Mars Observer as evidence. More importantly, he claims to have decoded a “tetrahedral geometry” to Cydonia, which suggests that its surface features are actually the ruins of an extraterrestrial civilization. In addition to pyramids, he asserts the existence of a Sphinx- completing a full cycle of Egyptian verisimilitude.

is this a freaking Sphinx on Mars?

Proof of aliens on Mars…check!

On to the moon….

After color-correcting and enhancing photographic images originally collected from the Apollo missions in the 60′s and 70′s, Hoagland claims to have discovered evidence of ancient lunar engineering: the existence of vast, semi-transparent geometric superstructures, including a mile-high crystal castle. He cites as evidence a 1955 Disney movie called Man in Space, a dramatization of a journey to the moon in which a geometric structure on the lunar surface is revealed. BOTH the director, Wernher Von Braun, a rocket engineer, Nazi SS officer, and close friend to Heinreich Himmler, AND producer Walt Disney were Scottish Rite Freemasons, as were, incidentally, four of the twelve men who walked on the moon.

lunar artifact

But wait, so why have the Apollo astronauts never mentioned seeing these glass castles soaring above the lunar horizon? Well, because they were hypnotized by the occult secret society of Masonic bloodlines controlling NASA. Duh!

What some people will do to make ends meet…

Shapeshifters on YouTube and the Anunnaki

The idea that a race of aliens—referred to by conspiracy theorists as the Anunnaki—is embedded among the human population is a belief held by author David Icke. He believes mankind is the result of prehistorical interbreeding between these reptilian aliens (also known as the Serpent-Gods) and humans, a babylonian orgy which created powerful and insidious hybrid bloodlines. Out of these bloodlines came the elite royal families of the world, the Illuminati, who have controlled all governments, banking systems and transnational corporations since.

Hillary Clinton sheds her skin

Chosen ones from these bloodlines are culled by the Reptilians and groomed to be in positions of power—they are the Suits (politicians, executives, etc.), puppets essentially. Once they are established, their alien masters deploy them to carry out the master agenda of forging a one world government and enslaving the human race.

Effectively throwing a pie in the face of Ocham’s Razor, Icke points to historical documents such as ancient Summerian texts, which depict serpent worship as the oldest religion. And, ALSO, there is serpent symbolism on the coat of arms for the Knights Templar. This proves mankind’s intimate relationship with extraterrestrials.

The theory gets even more bizarre when Icke starts in on shape-shifters, or human descendants of the hybrid alien bloodline who momentarily shift in form and become visible to the observer as reptilians. There are numerous conspiracists who purport to have video clips of such shape-shifting. Remember, Icke cautions, it’s not a shape-shift from a physical body to another body, it’s a shifting of holograms—the perceptions of the observer have fundamentally changed and they are able to decode the energy field. You see, the hybrids have a vibrational affinity with their reptilian overlords and can be possessed by them.

Well why didn’t you say that in the first place? Here I was thinking that the hybrids didn’t have a vibrational affinity with the Reptilian overlords…This. Changes. Everything.

Like any intrepid explorer in search of the truth, I ended up watching YouTube videos. For several days in a row I burned the midnight oil watching footage alleging to have caught reptilian shape-shifters in the act of transformation. Cue videos, edited by albino gingers in Affliction t-shirts, set to music from System of a Down or Linkin Park, and featuring various CNN reporters, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Harrison Ford, Jesse Jackson, an aide to John Edwards, Drew Carey, Brad Pitt, Elvis, and of course Henry Kissinger.

What conspiracy theory would be complete without Henry Kissinger and his flapping turkey jowls?

Each of the videos contain some, if not all, of the following characteristics:

-Pupils momentarily appearing to transform into oblong slits.
-Faces suddenly impressed with scaly patterns.
-Over-active, fork-shaped tongues and jagged teeth; odd, sinister smiles.

I reached a few conclusions. One) YouTube should not be embraced as a step in the scientific method. Two) some people have really creepy eyes. Three) poor video compression results in scale-like pixelation.

Four) some people are weird-looking, to the point of looking lizard-like.

And five) Brad Pitt is infinitely more desirable to women than I am.

-Jake Anderson

Ancient Astronauts, Future Friends

The following is a feverish, hamburger-inspired meditation on aliens, artificial intelligence, and the New World Order :

My gut instinct is that there are many advanced extraterrestrial civilizations flourishing beyond our solar system. In a universe containing billions of galaxies, each one containing billions of stars, to believe otherwise is an exercise in ignorant hubris.

photo by chamakoso

But it could take a while for us to meet ET. Centuries perhaps. Much sooner than that we’ll not only meet, but create, a new and dramatically different kind of advanced species: Artificial Intelligence. AI will be good to us….at least at first. AI might even introduce us to ET, like a friend of a friend at a party – (“Dude, you gotta meet this dude, he’s a great photographer!”). As AI integrates itself into our society, humans will use nanotechnology to upgrade ourselves to near-machine status. We’ll become post-humans, in that most of our day to day functions and pleasures will be heavily grounded in advanced technology. The foundation for this has already been laid. It’s all around us. Soon it will be within us.

Along these lines I agree with elements of Alex Jones’ New World Order theories. Note, elements. On other issues he’s just a wackadoodle. Somehow reptilian aliens controlling mankind is more plausible to him than than CO2 emissions destroying the atmosphere. Flanked by an armada of rabid libertarians, Alex Jones thinks the specter of global warming is nothing more than an elaborate ruse perpetrated by scientists and government officials in order to pave the way for a global carbon tax. Their main evidence disproving human-caused climate change is 1) Al Gore has a private jet, 2) Earth isn’t the only planet getting warmer, Mars is hot too, 3) cities during the medieval times were also hot, 3) Al Gore has a private limousine, and 4) Vikings grew crops in Greenland. Oh man, Vikings grew crops in Greenland?? Well fuck me running, let’s poison and vaporize the rest of our ozone, my bad, I didn’t know Vikings grew crops in Greenland!

You would be hard-pressed to find an assertion that makes me angrier than human-caused climate change denial. It’s the final sick-home for free market sociopaths, a rent-controlled insane asylum they sub-lease with creationists and teabaggers. I see nothing but dangerous insanity in the act of looking at a unanimously agreed-upon body of science and declaring it false, to the catastrophic detriment of global ecosystems and future generations of humans, simply because property taxes are a bummer. BUT–and here’s my hamartia–while I have trouble believing a small circle of elite masterminds controls the world, I do think it’s very possible that at some point in the future a class of post-humans, wielding advanced technology in dissonant collusion with AI societies—who (perhaps justly) believe humanity and its old world paradigms are a danger to Earth—could descend into absolute tyranny. Or, ascend, might be the better word. In “Adams in the Void” (a short story I haven’t written yet), I position this post-human/AI master race as taking over the surface of the planet, while old school humans are forced underground.

photo by rahll for Bonded By Blood

Alex Jones thinks the participants of this new class have already been chosen, and that in exchange for their complicity in forging the New World Order they have been promised vast powers of life augmentation and life extension. Frankly, my problem with the NWO is that I find it difficult to imagine a completely centralized global dictatorship when the trends behind technologies like the Internet lean overwhelmingly toward de-centralization—of knowledge, distribution, and even ownership. Jones’ theory also crumbles in one very important capacity: I don’t view AI as necessarily a danger to humanity. If the New World Order exists, AI will be the power that brings it down.

And if, like I believe, the phrase New World Order does not finger a singular group of tyrannical elites but rather exists as a metaphor for the widespread and historical lineage of human corruption itself, AI will be the revolutionary force that topples our dying regimes and restores parity to human consciousness. This will either be viewed as Armageddon or renaissance, depending on whose Twitter feed you follow.

I admit I harbor some fairly busy visions of the future. But I’m not married to them, and when push comes to shove I don’t believe in most conspiracy theories. I don’t believe that reptilian aliens inter-bred with humans. I don’t believe in crystal castles on the moon, or that Kennedy was killed by an emo hobgoblin who lives under a bridge. I don’t believe in ancient astronauts.

photo by yrindale

I feel the same disdain for conspiracy theories that I feel for celebrity gossip: intense guilt, for willfully distracting myself from the bigger problems of the world. And while I don’t personally dislike conspiracy theorists, they worry me…because I think they unwittingly make activists and whistle-blowers seem crazy, and by doing so distract the rest of us from the back-handed power plays of very real and very corrupt establishments. Corporations, seizing the infrastructure of the Earth, of the human body, of the particles that constitute matter. Corporations, who now own patents on our genes, on carbon nanotubes; who control the flow and substance of information; who influence what pills we take and what facts we believe; who hunt our young, on the streets and through social networking sites; who sell us culture before we’ve had a chance to decide if it’s just.

The theory of a New World Order is a displaced fear of plutocracy, privatization, and human existence turned to consumer fodder. It’s a healthy fear.

-Jake Anderson

Lighting Out: Interstellar Travel and Warp Speed

EINSTEIN OR NOT?

Photo by shamantrixx

Before we can talk about Galactic Science Fiction, we must discuss interstellar travel, which is, after all, a highly improbable engineering feat. Science fiction writers and readers have nonetheless traveled the star lanes for several decades, and galactic SF flourishes even today.

Writers who pursue the interstellar themes have an important choice to make in setting up the premise of their stories. That is, do they observe the Einsteinian (for Albert Einstein) speed limit or not? In Einsteinian theory nothing can exceed the speed of light, which is approximately 186,000 miles per second. The closest star outside our solar system is Alpha Centauri, at a distance of four and a half light-years (a light-year being the distance that light would travel in a year). Most stars are considerably farther away.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is approximately 100,000 light-years in diameter, and the distance to the closest full-sized galaxy is 2.2 million light years. The distance to the edge of the universe is estimated at 15 billion light-years. After a point, of course, these measurements have little practical meaning for us.

If we assume the Einsteinian limitation in our interstellar travel, we will need a long, long time to get to even the closest star outside our own solar system. Writers working within the speed of light limitation have tried several approaches to interstellar travel.

Photo by ashmael

One method of travel is by ark, a giant spacecraft with a life-support system that can sustain the several generations needed to travel to a star. This type of craft is sometimes called a “generation-ship.” You will be looking at two examples of travel by generation ship, Heinlein’s “Universe” and Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama

ACROSS THE DISTANCES OF SPACE

Heinlein’s work in particular suggests the problems inherent in the generation-ship, both as an engineering possibility and an SF convention. For one, the generations following the first, even though they may not believe in the mission in the same way that the founders did, must still live out their lives on the mission. Succeeding generations become discontent and rebel against the authority of the ship, even though they have, in reality, little choice but to continue the mission. As an SF convention, the generation- ship requires a shift of emphasis from the adventure of exploring new worlds to the social problems the generation-ship creates.

Another method for getting humans across the vast expanses of outer space is to put them in suspended animation so that they can sleep away the time needed to travel. This convention has been used in Alien and Planet of the Apes, just to name a couple of popular movies.

Another solution to the enormous distances lies in the paradoxes of Einsteinian space-time relations. According to the Einsteinian description of space-time, as we increase our speed, the time for the people traveling actually slows down in relation to the people who are not traveling (or who are stationary “relative” to the people who are traveling). At the speeds at which we normally travel, the differences are so tiny as to be incalculable. For example, if the trip that I take from work to home is, say, one billionth of second slower for me than it is for the person waiting at home, then there is no practical consequence.

However, as we approach the speed of light, the slowing of time for the traveler is far more noticeable. In fact, if we were traveling just under the speed of light to Alpha Centauri (four and one-half light-years away), we would experience a passage of time of only days. The people who remained stationary relative to our travel would, however, experience the passage of the entire four and one-half years. This kind of time slippage, however, will not soon be a practical problem for us. The energy needed to move an object at even a small fraction of the speed of light is so enormous as to be technologically unfeasible. We will not anytime soon be traveling near the speed of light.

We can, though, see the problem that such travel could represent for characters in SF. Travelers setting out on a journey of one hundred years are, in effect, saying good-bye forever to all the people they know. What may be only a trip of weeks for them will be a hundred years for the people who stay home. By the time the travelers reach their destination, their friends back home will be long dead and buried.

Through the ‘60s and ‘70s, Ursula K. Le Guin made excellent thematic use of this time slippage in her Hain novels. She even calls her starships NAFALs, an acronym, presumably, for not-as-fast-as-light. Her starships are opposed to those of other SF writers who have FTL ships (faster-than-light). Other SF writers have explored the psychological implications of this time slippage, one notable case being Joan Vinge in The Snow Queen (1984).

Perhaps the easiest way to engage in interstellar travel is to assume that the light barrier can be broken. Many SF writers simply put their starships into space-warp (or hyper-space, or whatever the writer chooses to call the device that enables FTL travel) and get their stories moving. (Star Trek travel is done at warp-speed). At one time or another, some of the best SF talents have, without too much concern for engineering plausibility, taken their characters from one star system to another at speeds greater than that of light.

Yet another way humankind has made it across the enormous distances of space is by teleportation through “gates.” Gates assume a technology that allows the alignment at one locus of two separate places, which may be light-years apart. The traveler merely walks through the “gate” (and, we assume, some sort of energy field) and goes from earth to Mars, or to Alpha Centauri–or to whatever location the machinery is adjusted.

Photo by JoeJesus

The leap in imagination needed to accept travel by gating doesn’t seem so much greater than for accepting FTL. Still, we associate travel with some form of vehicle, and perhaps gating around the universe defies some deeper level of common sense. A number of pretty good stories have been based on gates (Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky, Clifford Simak’s Way Station, and the film, Stargate, to name a few), but gating has not been a major convention in science fiction. Since the days of Jules Verne, extraordinary voyagers have insisted on some appropriately dignified form of transportation—a ship.

GALACTIC CIVILIZATION AND ISSAC ASIMOV

One of the earliest galactic civilizations that FTL made possible is in Edmond Hamilton’s stories (1929-1930) about the Interstellar Federation. Headquartered on Canopus, the Federation sent out multi-species crews to patrol the galaxy and to right wrongs.

The name now associated with galactic empires is Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), whose Foundation Trilogy first pulled together a coherent and plausible (at least at the time) version of galactic civilization. Written between 1942 and 1949, the three volumes (Foundation, 1951; Foundation and Empire, 1952; and Second Foundation, 1953) portray a technological civilization in crisis. In Foundation we are introduced to Trantor, the capital city of the empire, itself a lesson in how civilization can become over-centralized. Literally billions of bureaucrats administer the empire in massive buildings from which they can never see the light of day. Evidence of decay lies in the inability of the empire to maintain order on the galactic periphery, as neo-barbarism threatens the peace and order that has lasted for millennia. The analogy is clearly (perhaps too clearly) based on the Roman Empire and its collapse in the face of the Germanic invasions.

One visionary, Hari Seldon, through the “science” of psychohistory, attempts to forestall the eventual collapse of the empire that will result in so such great destruction. He establishes a tiny settlement on the edge of the galaxy, which has the ostensible purpose of preserving the cultural heritage of the empire by compiling the Encyclopedia Galatica. His true intent, though, is to establish the nucleus of a new order that will survive the coming destruction. The adventures of the Foundation in that far future make for fascinating reading.

The virtues of the new order, the Foundation, are strikingly similar to virtues of post-World War II America—gumption, get-up-and-go, free enterprise, and the establishment of new markets. Because Asimov reveals a future that is strikingly analogous to corporate America, some readers are uncomfortable with what they see as a dated ideology.

But whatever the deficiencies in Asimov’s work that we see in retrospect, he is nonetheless important for establishing the major features of galactic SF. His Foundation Trilogy is the kind of SF that many contemporary SF writers grew up on. Their work now wouldn’t be the same without him, and Asimov is an indispensable influence in the development of SF during the so-called Golden Age.

A LOGICAL PROGRESSION

Planetary SF allowed several new places to set a story, but those new locations were used up pretty fast. SF writers needed new locations, and interstellar travel supplied them in virtually an infinite number. Writers—with Asimov leading the way—soon mapped and established the rules for using this new space.

Given the progression from lunar, to interplanetary, to interstellar SF, we might wonder about the development of inter-galactic SF. Stories here and there deal with travel between galaxies, but writers by and large have not developed any special or important themes that would require travel between galaxies.

-Steve Anderson

Categories: Aliens, Film/Literature, Space Tags: Asimov, Heinlein, light speed, Science fiction, space, starship, wormhole