Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (192 page)

Spaceships in science fiction come in all shapes and sizes, from practical and realistic ships of exploration like the
Discovery
in Arthur Clarke’s
2001: a space odyssey
to large interstellar passenger cruisers like the living Tree ships of Dan Simmons’s
Hyperion
(1989). They can be small and utilitarian, as in the Emergency Dispatch Ships of “The Cold Equations” (1954) by Tom Godwin, or so large that they can support entire societies within their interior, as in the mysterious Rama from Clarke’s novel
Rendezvous with Rama
(1972). They can be small, privately owned vessels like the numerous trading ships that appear in Isaac Asimov’s
Foundation
, or they can be military vessels of war, such as the increasingly powerful battleships that fill E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman novels.

The type of space travel an author uses is often a consideration in stories about space combat. Some FTL drives would seem to be too powerful; if a ship can travel anywhere near instantaneously, how could one military force ever stop another? An attacking force could simply jump to the other side of a defending force and reach its target. The writers of the role-playing game based on the
Star Wars
films (1977–83) faced this problem when they had to make hard-and-fast rules that corresponded to the exciting-but-unexacting battles seen on screen. The writers solved the problem by picking up on an indication in Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of the original film that gravity wells inhibit hyperdrives, making FTL impossible too close to a planet or star. In the Imperial Sourcebook (1989), Greg Gorden introduced “interdiction” ships, which create “artificial” gravity wells to trap enemy vessels.

Other SF stories seem to develop the rules of FTL travel, and follow with space combat that will match.
For example, wormholes are used in the Vorkosigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, beginning with
Shards of Honor
(1986), where much of the strategy in the series concerns wormholes. If a star system can only be accessed via a wormhole, that makes wormholes valuable strategic points, but they also give defenders large advantages in combat, as attackers must channel all their forces through a narrow point. David Gerrold’s
Starhunt
(1985) also developed a form of space combat that would be a natural outgrowth of his FTL drive; the faster a ship is moving, the greater the “stress field” it creates when it warps space, and the further away it can be detected from. This results in a situation where as one spaceship sneaks up on another, it must move more and more slowly, until it reaches the range where it is not possible to remain undetected, and then accelerate to maximum, creating a form of space combat similar to submarine warfare.

On the other hand, some authors will devise forms of space travel to achieve a certain effect. David Weber’s Honor Harrington novels, beginning with
On Basilisk Station
(1993), are supposed to be science fiction versions of the Age of Sail and the Napoleonic Wars, especially their depiction in C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels (1937–62). As a result, Weber devised a version of FTL travel that required ships to use energy sails to travel through hyperspace (far less realistic than Vance and Clarke’s solar sails), giving all of the combat action a nautical feel. Similarly, when writing The Last World War (2003), Dayton Ward wanted to focus on ground combat, and hence used small, ground-level wormholes like Kirby’s boom tubes, eschewing spaceships entirely.

In the 2000s, a subgenre of science fiction emerged known as “mundane SF,” evidenced in anthologies such as Geoff Ryman’s
When It Changed
and Jetse de Vries’s
Shine
(both 2010). One of the central tenets of mundane science fiction is that interstellar travel of any sort is fundamentally impossible, and the settings are typically limited to Earth. That such stories require their own subgenre speaks to the ubiquity of space travel in science fiction, to the fact that much science fiction concerns fantastic journeys to other planets.

But the centrality of space travel to science fiction has long been part of its appeal, even apart from the fact that space travel allows a writer to tell stories set on new worlds. As we can see even in James Blish’s “Surface Tension” (1952), where a group of aquatic microbes discovers a whole new realm to explore above the surface of their lake, space travel allows readers to reconceive their place within the universe. In 1929, decades before real space travel had been achieved, author Jack Williamson wrote that “It is the space flier that bears us most often to the world of golden adventure. It is as real an achievement as the locomotive or the airplane. Science discloses a wide universe. When man has found the means to explore it, he has conquered his environment. The space flier is a great achievement even if one is never built. The release of the mind from the earth to which it has been eternally chained has a real spiritual, inspirational value. That is the great gift of science fiction” (25).

Works Cited

Adams, Douglas.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
. 1979. New York: Del Rey, 2005. Print.

Asimov, Isaac. “The First Century of Science Fiction.” Introduction.
The Best Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century
. Eds. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh. New York: Knightsbridge, 1981. 9–12. Print.

Clarke, Arthur C.
2001: A Space Odyssey
. New York: New American Library, 1968. Print.

Ellik, Ron, and Bill Evans.
The Universes of E. E. Smith
. Chicago: Advent, 1966. Print.

Landis, Geoffrey A. “The Canonical List of StarDrives.”
Atomic Rocketships of the Space Patrol
. Winchell D. Chung, Jr., 10 Nov. 2010. Web. 6 Feb. 2011

trho.com/rocket/fasterlight.php#The_Canonical_List_of_StarDrives>.

Prucher, Jeff, ed.
Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print.

Williamson, Jack. “What Science Fiction Means to Me: Tremendous Contribution to Civilization.” 1929.
Thrilling Wonder Stories: Summer 2007
. Ed. Winston Engle. Los Angeles: Thrilling Wonder, 2007. 25–6. Print.

* * * *

Steven Mollmann
is a Ph.D. student at the University of Connecticut, where he studies the depiction of science and technology in fiction, focusing on the nineteenth century. He is the co-author of the
Star Trek
novels
A Choice of Catastrophes
and
Myriad Universes: Shattered Light: The Tears of Eridanus
.

(1902–1935)

Despite never finishing college (according to some accounts he was expelled for agreeing to take a test for a friend) Stanley Weinbaum had perhaps the briefest writing career of any major voice in science fiction. He sold his first book (a romance novel) at age thirty-one. His first SF story, the groundbreaking “A Martian Odyssey,” came out the following year. Weinbaum had thirteen SF stories published in the next eighteen months before his death from lung cancer; most of his work was published posthumously.

For contemporary readers, it can be hard to grasp what a stir this story made when it was first published in 1934. While its views of race and society are very much products of its time, its depiction of an alien species intellectually equal to (and possibly superior to) humanity was startlingly new in genre fiction. Just as startling were multiple alien species that weren’t particularly humanlike, and whose thoughts and actions were alien to the human characters. Obvious in retrospect, the story was widely imitated (including by Weinbaum himself, who wrote a sequel before his death).

First published in
Wonder Stories
, July 1934

Jarvis stretched himself as luxuriously as he could in the cramped general quarters of the
Ares
.

“Air you can breathe!” he exulted. “It feels as thick as soup after the thin stuff out there!” He nodded at the Martian landscape stretching flat and desolate in the light of the nearer moon, beyond the glass of the port.

The other three stared at him sympathetically—Putz, the engineer, Leroy, the biologist, and Harrison, the astronomer and captain of the expedition. Dick Jarvis was chemist of the famous crew, the
Ares
expedition, first human beings to set foot on the mysterious neighbor of the earth, the planet Mars. This, of course, was in the old days, less than twenty years after the mad American Doheny perfected the atomic blast at the cost of his life, and only a decade after the equally mad Cardoza rode on it to the moon. They were true pioneers, these four of the
Ares
. Except for a half-dozen moon expeditions and the ill-fated de Lancey flight aimed at the seductive orb of Venus, they were the first men to feel other gravity than earth’s, and certainly the first successful crew to leave the earth-moon system. And they deserved that success when one considers the difficulties and discomforts—the months spent in acclimatization chambers back on earth, learning to breathe the air as tenuous as that of Mars, the challenging of the void in the tiny rocket driven by the cranky reaction motors of the twenty-first century, and mostly the facing of an absolutely unknown world.

Jarvis stretched and fingered the raw and peeling tip of his frost-bitten nose. He sighed again contentedly.

“Well,” exploded Harrison abruptly, “are we going to hear what happened? You set out all shipshape in an auxiliary rocket, we don’t get a peep for ten days, and finally Putz here picks you out of a lunatic ant-heap with a freak ostrich as your pal! Spill it, man!”

“Speel?” queried Leroy perplexedly. “Speel what?”

“He means ‘
spiel
’,” explained Putz soberly. “It iss to tell.”

Jarvis met Harrison’s amused glance without the shadow of a smile. “That’s right, Karl,” he said in grave agreement with Putz. “
Ich spiel es!
” He grunted comfortably and began.

“According to orders,” he said, “I watched Karl here take off toward the North, and then I got into my flying sweat-box and headed South. You’ll remember, Cap—we had orders not to land, but just scout about for points of interest. I set the two cameras clicking and buzzed along, riding pretty high—about two thousand feet—for a couple of reasons. First, it gave the cameras a greater field, and second, the under-jets travel so far in this half-vacuum they call air here that they stir up dust if you move low.”

“We know all that from Putz,” grunted Harrison. “I wish you’d saved the films, though. They’d have paid the cost of this junket; remember how the public mobbed the first moon pictures?”

“The films are safe,” retorted Jarvis. “Well,” he resumed, “as I said, I buzzed along at a pretty good clip; just as we figured, the wings haven’t much lift in this air at less than a hundred miles per hour, and even then I had to use the under-jets.

“So, with the speed and the altitude and the blurring caused by the under-jets, the seeing wasn’t any too good. I could see enough, though, to distinguish that what I sailed over was just more of this grey plain that we’d been examining the whole week since our landing—same blobby growths and the same eternal carpet of crawling little plant-animals, or biopods, as Leroy calls them. So I sailed along, calling back my position every hour as instructed, and not knowing whether you heard me.”

“I did!” snapped Harrison.

“A hundred and fifty miles south,” continued Jarvis imperturbably, “the surface changed to a sort of low plateau, nothing but desert and orange-tinted sand. I figured that we were right in our guess, then, and this grey plain we dropped on was really the Mare Cimmerium which would make my orange desert the region called Xanthus. If I were right, I ought to hit another grey plain, the Mare Chronium in another couple of hundred miles, and then another orange desert, Thyle I or II. And so I did.”

“Putz verified our position a week and a half ago!” grumbled the captain. “Let’s get to the point.”

“Coming!” remarked Jarvis. “Twenty miles into Thyle—believe it or not—I crossed a canal!”

“Putz photographed a hundred! Let’s hear something new!”

“And did he also see a city?”

“Twenty of ‘em, if you call those heaps of mud cities!”

“Well,” observed Jarvis, “from here on I’ll be telling a few things Putz didn’t see!” He rubbed his tingling nose, and continued. “I knew that I had sixteen hours of daylight at this season, so eight hours—eight hundred miles—from here, I decided to turn back. I was still over Thyle, whether I or II I’m not sure, not more than twenty-five miles into it. And right there, Putz’s pet motor quit!”

“Quit? How?” Putz was solicitous.

“The atomic blast got weak. I started losing altitude right away, and suddenly there I was with a thump right in the middle of Thyle! Smashed my nose on the window, too!” He rubbed the injured member ruefully.

“Did you maybe try vashing der combustion chamber mit acid sulphuric?” inquired Putz. “Sometimes der lead giffs a secondary radiation—”

“Naw!” said Jarvis disgustedly. “I wouldn’t try that, of course—not more than ten times! Besides, the bump flattened the landing gear and busted off the under-jets. Suppose I got the thing working—what then? Ten miles with the blast coming right out of the bottom and I’d have melted the floor from under me!” He rubbed his nose again. “Lucky for me a pound only weighs seven ounces here, or I’d have been mashed flat!”

“I could have fixed!” ejaculated the engineer. “I bet it vas not serious.”

“Probably not,” agreed Jarvis sarcastically. “Only it wouldn’t fly. Nothing serious, but I had my choice of waiting to be picked up or trying to walk back—eight hundred miles, and perhaps twenty days before we had to leave! Forty miles a day! Well,” he concluded, “I chose to walk. Just as much chance of being picked up, and it kept me busy.”

“We’d have found you,” said Harrison.

“No doubt. Anyway, I rigged up a harness from some seat straps, and put the water tank on my back, took a cartridge belt and revolver, and some iron rations, and started out.”

“Water tank!” exclaimed the little biologist, Leroy. “She weigh one-quarter ton!”

“Wasn’t full. Weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds earth-weight, which is eighty-five here. Then, besides, my own personal two hundred and ten pounds is only seventy on Mars, so, tank and all, I grossed a hundred and fifty-five, or fifty-five pounds less than my everyday earth-weight. I figured on that when I undertook the forty-mile daily stroll. Oh—of course I took a thermo-skin sleeping bag for these wintry Martian nights.

“Off I went, bouncing along pretty quickly. Eight hours of daylight meant twenty miles or more. It got tiresome, of course—plugging along over a soft sand desert with nothing to see, not even Leroy’s crawling biopods. But an hour or so brought me to the canal—just a dry ditch about four hundred feet wide, and straight as a railroad on its own company map.

“There’d been water in it sometime, though. The ditch was covered with what looked like a nice green lawn. Only, as I approached, the lawn moved out of my way!”

“Eh?” said Leroy.

“Yeah, it was a relative of your biopods. I caught one—a little grass-like blade about as long as my finger, with two thin, stemmy legs.”

“He is where?” Leroy was eager.

“He is let go! I had to move, so I plowed along with the walking grass opening in front and closing behind. And then I was out on the orange desert of Thyle again.

“I plugged steadily along, cussing the sand that made going so tiresome, and, incidentally, cussing that cranky motor of yours, Karl. It was just before twilight that I reached the edge of Thyle, and looked down over the gray Mare Chronium. And I knew there was seventy-five miles of that to be walked over, and then a couple of hundred miles of that Xanthus desert, and about as much more Mare Cimmerium. Was I pleased? I started cussing you fellows for not picking me up!”

“We were trying, you sap!” said Harrison.

“That didn’t help. Well, I figured I might as well use what was left of daylight in getting down the cliff that bounded Thyle. I found an easy place, and down I went. Mare Chronium was just the same sort of place as this—crazy leafless plants and a bunch of crawlers; I gave it a glance and hauled out my sleeping bag. Up to that time, you know, I hadn’t seen anything worth worrying about on this half-dead world—nothing dangerous, that is.”

“Did you?” queried Harrison.

“Did I! You’ll hear about it when I come to it. Well, I was just about to turn in when suddenly I heard the wildest sort of shenanigans!”

“Vot iss shenanigans?” inquired Putz.

“He says, ‘Je ne sais quoi,’” explained Leroy. “It is to say, ‘I don’t know what.’”

“That’s right,” agreed Jarvis. “I didn’t know what, so I sneaked over to find out. There was a racket like a flock of crows eating a bunch of canaries—whistles, cackles, caws, trills, and what have you. I rounded a clump of stumps, and there was Tweel!”

“Tweel?” said Harrison, and “Tveel?” said Leroy and Putz.

“That freak ostrich,” explained the narrator. “At least, Tweel is as near as I can pronounce it without sputtering. He called it something like ‘Trrrweerrlll.’”

“What was he doing?” asked the Captain.

“He was being eaten! And squealing, of course, as any one would.”

“Eaten! By what?”

“I found out later. All I could see then was a bunch of black ropy arms tangled around what looked like, as Putz described it to you, an ostrich. I wasn’t going to interfere, naturally; if both creatures were dangerous, I’d have one less to worry about.

“But the bird-like thing was putting up a good battle, dealing vicious blows with an eighteen-inch beak, between screeches. And besides, I caught a glimpse or two of what was on the end of those arms!” Jarvis shuddered. “But the clincher was when I noticed a little black bag or case hung about the neck of the bird-thing! It was intelligent! That or tame, I assumed. Anyway, it clinched my decision. I pulled out my automatic and fired into what I could see of its antagonist.

“There was a flurry of tentacles and a spurt of black corruption, and then the thing, with a disgusting sucking noise, pulled itself and its arms into a hole in the ground. The other let out a series of clacks, staggered around on legs about as thick as golf sticks, and turned suddenly to face me. I held my weapon ready, and the two of us stared at each other.

“The Martian wasn’t a bird, really. It wasn’t even bird-like, except just at first glance. It had a beak all right, and a few feathery appendages, but the beak wasn’t really a beak. It was somewhat flexible; I could see the tip bend slowly from side to side; it was almost like a cross between a beak and a trunk. It had four-toed feet, and four fingered things—hands, you’d have to call them, and a little roundish body, and a long neck ending in a tiny head—and that beak. It stood an inch or so taller than I, and—well, Putz saw it!”

The engineer nodded. “Ja! I saw!”

Jarvis continued. “So—we stared at each other. Finally the creature went into a series of clackings and twitterings and held out its hands toward me, empty. I took that as a gesture of friendship.”

“Perhaps,” suggested Harrison, “it looked at that nose of yours and thought you were its brother!”

“Huh! You can be funny without talking! Anyway, I put up my gun and said ‘Aw, don’t mention it,’ or something of the sort, and the thing came over and we were pals.

“By that time, the sun was pretty low and I knew that I’d better build a fire or get into my thermo-skin. I decided on the fire. I picked a spot at the base of the Thyle cliff, where the rock could reflect a little heat on my back. I started breaking off chunks of this desiccated Martian vegetation, and my companion caught the idea and brought in an armful. I reached for a match, but the Martian fished into his pouch and brought out something that looked like a glowing coal; one touch of it, and the fire was blazing—and you all know what a job we have starting a fire in this atmosphere!

“And that bag of his!” continued the narrator. “That was a manufactured article, my friends; press an end and she popped open—press the middle and she sealed so perfectly you couldn’t see the line. Better than zippers.

“Well, we stared at the fire a while and I decided to attempt some sort of communication with the Martian. I pointed at myself and said ‘Dick’; he caught the drift immediately, stretched a bony claw at me and repeated ‘Tick.’ Then I pointed at him, and he gave that whistle I called Tweel; I can’t imitate his accent. Things were going smoothly; to emphasize the names, I repeated ‘Dick,’ and then, pointing at him, ‘Tweel.’

“There we stuck! He gave some clacks that sounded negative, and said something like ‘P-p-p-proot.’ And that was just the beginning; I was always ‘Tick,’ but as for him—part of the time he was ‘Tweel,’ and part of the time he was ‘P-p-p-proot,’ and part of the time he was sixteen other noises!

“We just couldn’t connect. I tried ‘rock,’ and I tried ‘star,’ and ‘tree,’ and ‘fire,’ and Lord knows what else, and try as I would, I couldn’t get a single word! Nothing was the same for two successive minutes, and if that’s a language, I’m an alchemist! Finally I gave it up and called him Tweel, and that seemed to do.

“But Tweel hung on to some of my words. He remembered a couple of them, which I suppose is a great achievement if you’re used to a language you have to make up as you go along. But I couldn’t get the hang of his talk; either I missed some subtle point or we just didn’t
think
alike—and I rather believe the latter view.

“I’ve other reasons for believing that. After a while I gave up the language business, and tried mathematics. I scratched two plus two equals four on the ground, and demonstrated it with pebbles. Again Tweel caught the idea, and informed me that three plus three equals six. Once more we seemed to be getting somewhere.

“So, knowing that Tweel had at least a grammar school education, I drew a circle for the sun, pointing first at it, and then at the last glow of the sun. Then I sketched in Mercury, and Venus, and Mother Earth, and Mars, and finally, pointing to Mars, I swept my hand around in a sort of inclusive gesture to indicate that Mars was our current environment. I was working up to putting over the idea that my home was on the earth.