Solar System in fiction

• 1. Introduction

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  Lucian of Samosata wrote what are among the oldest surviving examples of Solar System in fiction around 160 to 180 CE. His True History sends a ship to the Moon by whirlwind, where the crew discovers a war between the lunar inhabitants and the people of the Sun over the colonization of Venus. Gary Westfahl, a science fiction scholar, calls that reference to Venus the first appearance of any planet in the genre.

  After Lucian, the interplanetary voyage largely fell out of use for more than a millennium. What force eventually brought it back? Why did Mars come to displace the Moon as fiction's most popular destination in the late 1800s? And how did the pulp magazines of the early 1900s build the Solar System into the landscape of popular imagination?

  Amazing Stories, the first magazine dedicated to science fiction, was launched by Hugo Gernsback in 1926. He found that interplanetary stories were his readers' favorite kind.

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• 2. Ancient Worlds

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  Adam Roberts, a science fiction scholar, explains that for the ancient Greeks the Moon and Sun occupied a different conceptual space from the stars. They were part of the earthly sky rather than the divine realm of the heavens. Arthur C. Clarke noted that the classical planets were visible only as wandering points of light; grouped mentally with the stars, visiting them was unthinkable.

  Philolaus and Plutarch both wrote in their nonfiction that the Moon might be inhabited. Roberts and science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz both posit that many interplanetary stories predating the surviving ones may have been lost. The literary record from classical antiquity is, in any case, very incomplete.

  The earliest known work of interplanetary fiction is Antonius Diogenes's Of the Wonderful Things Beyond Thule. It describes a journey on foot that reaches the Moon by traveling northward. The work is lost; what survives is a brief summary in Photius's Bibliotheca, written around 870 CE. Its original date is debated, with estimates ranging from the 300s BCE to the 100s CE.

  Lucian of Samosata left a second tale of otherworldly travel in Icaromenippus. The Cynic philosopher Menippus, inspired by the legend of Icarus, attaches bird wings to his arms and flies to the Moon. His goal is to find a vantage point from which to settle the dispute over the shape of the Earth. Roberts observes that science fiction as a whole faded from the literary record a few centuries after Lucian, at the start of the so-called Dark Ages.

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• 3. Kepler and the New Cosmos

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  Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543, proposing that the planets orbit the Sun rather than the Earth. The full mathematical proof came only with Isaac Newton's work more than a century later. Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, written around 1320, had already sent a traveler to the Moon, but Adam Roberts draws a distinction. Dante treats the Moon as the lowest level of Heaven, not a material world. Giambattista Marino's 1622 epic L'Adone, by contrast, treats the Moon, Mercury, and Venus as worlds qualitatively like Earth, even while retaining the geocentric model.

  Johannes Kepler, known for his three laws of planetary motion, wrote what is sometimes considered the first science fiction novel. His Somnium was designed to explain and advance the Copernican model; its first draft was completed in 1593, before the telescope existed. Revised in 1609 and expanded until Kepler's death in 1630, it was published posthumously in 1634. The book describes two populations of intelligent life on the Moon, each adapted to the month-long cycle of day and night. The near-side inhabitants can determine the time of day from Earth's changing phase in the sky.

  Giordano Bruno was executed in 1600, convicted of heresy in part for asserting that other celestial bodies were worlds like the Earth and might be inhabited. By the mid-1600s the controversy had eased enough for the topic to appear openly. Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle's 1686 Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes helped normalize the idea, describing diverse and fundamentally nonhuman lifeforms adapted to each planet's conditions. Fontenelle also proposed that unseen planets orbiting other stars were inhabited. Christiaan Huygens's posthumously published 1698 Cosmotheoros took a different position, depicting the inhabitants of other planets as essentially human, on the grounds that Earth ought not to be unique.

  Francis Godwin's posthumously published 1638 novel The Man in the Moone sent its protagonist to the Moon on a flock of migratory birds. A utopia was waiting there. John Wilkins's 1638 nonfiction work The Discovery of a World in the Moone discussed the practical considerations of travel. Its 1640 edition added one of the earliest references to lunar colonization, treating it as a natural next step once the transport problem was solved. Cyrano de Bergerac's posthumously published 1657 novel Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon tried various devices for the journey. Among them was the first fictional rocket. Brian Stableford, in his 2006 encyclopedia of science fiction, described the problem of plausible space travel in this era as an awkward challenge. Cyrano's 1662 sequel found both the Moon and the Sun inhabited; among the beings encountered on the Moon was the protagonist of Godwin's novel.

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• 4. Satire and Utopia

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  Margaret Cavendish's 1666 novel The Blazing World describes a planet joined to the Earth at the North Pole. The book combines utopian elements with satire of the Royal Society, the scientific establishment of the day. Westfahl observes that writers up through the 1700s invariably imagined humanlike inhabitants of other planets and used those settings for social commentary. Gabriel Daniel's 1690 novel A Voyage to the World of Cartesius sent its narrator to the Moon and beyond. Its target was the philosophy of Rene Descartes; Descartes's spirit appears in the story, occupied with correcting God's errors.

  Daniel Defoe's 1705 novel The Consolidator used a lunar voyage to satirize the British political system. Samuel Brunt's 1727 novel A Voyage to Cacklogallinia applied the same device to the South Sea Bubble. Voltaire's 1752 work Micromegas introduced a striking reversal. In the story, a being from Sirius and one from Saturn arrive on Earth rather than the other way round. This remained a rare motif throughout the period.

  The invention of the balloon in 1783 made flight within the atmosphere popular as a subject. It also demonstrated that high-altitude conditions are not survivable for unprotected humans. Yet the balloon itself became a common vehicle for fictional interplanetary voyages. The convention persisted as late as 1873, when an anonymous novel sent a traveler named Paul Aermont on a tour of the planets.

  Roger Lancelyn Green writes that scientific advancements of the late 1600s and 1700s may help explain why the satirical mode dominated this period. As the 1800s opened, the growing body of astronomical knowledge was beginning to change what fiction set in the Solar System could plausibly claim.

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• 5. Mars Ascendant

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  George Tucker's 1827 novel A Voyage to the Moon was the first to treat anti-gravity as a scientific rather than supernatural mechanism. Tucker published it under the pseudonym Joseph Atterley. Edgar Allan Poe knew Tucker's work; Poe had been a student at the University of Virginia in 1826 when Tucker was a professor. In 1835, Poe published The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, a lunar story with elements of deliberate credibility. A promised sequel never materialized. Richard Adams Locke's so-called Great Moon Hoax appeared a few weeks later, claiming astronomer John Herschel had discovered life on the Moon. Jules Verne took Poe's stated wish for greater plausibility in space fiction seriously. His 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon relied on an enormous cannon to launch its vessel. Arthur C. Clarke later noted that such a launch would not in reality have been survivable.

  Giovanni Schiaparelli, during the opposition of Mars in 1877, announced the discovery of linear structures he called canali on the Martian surface. The word means channels in Italian but was widely translated as canals. Percival Lowell popularized the interpretation that these were artificial constructs of an advanced Martian civilization, through non-fiction books published between 1895 and 1908. Advances in astronomy had by then established that the Moon was not habitable; Mars, in contrast, seemed increasingly likely to support life.

  The first novel set specifically on Mars was Percy Greg's 1880 Across the Zodiac, which featured a form of anti-gravity called apergy. The term was adopted in many later works, including John Jacob Astor IV's 1894 novel A Journey in Other Worlds. By 1897, two novels had used the Martian setting to introduce alien invasion. They were Kurd Lasswitz's Auf zwei Planeten and H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. In Lasswitz's novel the Martians are human-like creatures who begin with benevolent intentions but end up acting as a colonial power. Wells's Martians are utterly inhuman and bent on conquest. The War of the Worlds is considered one of the most influential works in the history of science fiction. Auf zwei Planeten was translated into several languages and highly influential in Continental Europe, but did not receive an English translation until the 1970s.

  Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series began with A Princess of Mars in 1912 and continued until 1943. Westfahl describes it as the most famous and well-developed Mars in science fiction. The series was populated by exotic creatures, several sentient races, and an advanced civilization in decline, inspired in part by Lowell's speculations. Wells had already kept the Moon in play with his 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon, using an anti-gravity material called Cavorite. He placed life on the interior of the Moon rather than its visibly lifeless surface. Georges Melies's 1902 short film Le voyage dans la lune became the first science fiction film, loosely adapting both Wells's novel and Verne's. Brian Stableford notes that although the subgenre Burroughs launched is known as planetary romance, the extraterrestrial setting was largely incidental. These stories were set elsewhere not because writers believed those worlds matched their descriptions, but because Earth was known not to.

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• 6. The Pulp Universe

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  Wonder Stories Quarterly, one of Gernsback's magazines, bore the subtitle Interplanetary Stories above its title beginning with the Spring 1931 issue. E. F. Bleiler, a science fiction bibliographer, noted that two-thirds of the stories in those issues were interplanetary stories. Sam Moskowitz commented that Gernsback's actions, and his competitors' response, hastened the evolution of what would become the most popular theme in science fiction. Before Gernsback's dedicated magazines, interplanetary stories had already been appearing in general pulp magazines for decades. Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars, for instance, first appeared in The All-Story Magazine.

  The catalogue compiled by E. F. Bleiler and Richard Bleiler covers every story in science fiction magazines from 1926 to 1936. Mars alone appears in more than ten percent of them. Venus appears in around seven percent. Westfahl comments that the 1930s were dominated by space operas set within the Solar System. The planetary romance subgenre reached its peak between the 1930s and 1950s, typically depicting Mars as a desert planet and Venus as covered in jungle.

  Fritz Lang's 1929 film Frau im Mond depicted deep lunar valleys containing pockets of breathable air. This became a popular device for fiction set on the Moon, bypassing the need for space suits. Edgar Rice Burroughs's 1926 novel The Moon Maid took the approach further, describing a hollow Moon. Pluto, discovered in 1930, proved relatively popular in fiction in the decades that followed. Brian Stableford posits its initial appeal owed in part to the novelty of its recent discovery. Stories involving Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune erroneously portrayed them as solid planets throughout this period; the mistake persisted in fiction until the late 1950s.

  The success of Apollo 11 in 1969 marked the end for stories about fictional first Moon landings. Advances in planetary science in the early Space Age had already rendered many previous assumptions about Solar System conditions obsolete. During the 1970s, the planets appeared only sporadically as settings; extrasolar locations became the preferred terrain. Toward the end of the century, a resurgence appeared, with themes such as terraforming bringing the Solar System back into focus.

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