Born of the Sun: Adventures in Our Solar System (British Library Science Fiction Classics): 14 - Softcover

Poul Anderson; Larry Niven; Clare Winger Harris; John & Dorothy De Courcy; Clifford D. Simak; Leslie F. Stone; Robert Silverberg; E. R. James; James Blish; Miles J. Breuer; John Ashcroft

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0712353569 ISBN 13: 9780712353564

Publisher: British Library Publishing, 2020

Synopsis

On Mercury: How do you outrun the dawn and its lethal sunrise?
On Jupiter: When humans transfer their minds into the local fauna to explore the surface, why do they never return?
On Pluto: How long must an astronaut wait for rescue at the furthest reaches of the system?

We have always been fascinated by the promise of space and the distant lure of our fellow planets orbiting the Sun. In this new collection of classic stories, Mike Ashley takes us on a journey from the harsh extremes of Mercury to the turbulent expanses of Saturn and beyond, exploring as we go the literary history of the planets, the influence of contemporary astronomy on the imagination of writers, and the impact of their storytelling on humanity's perception of these hitherto unreachable worlds.

Featuring the talents of Larry Niven, Robert Silverberg, Clare Winger Harris and more, this collection offers a kaleidoscope of innovative thought and timeless adventures.

About this title

About the Author

Mike Ashley has edited several British Library Science Fiction Classics anthologies which explore Golden Age themes such as artificial intelligence, time travel and encounters with aliens. These collections include Beyond Time: Classic Tales of Time Unwound and The End of the World and Other Catastrophes.

From the Back Cover

Terror in the steamy jungles of Venus, encounters on the arid expanse of Jupiter; asteroids mysteriously bursting with vegetation whizz past and reveal worlds beyond imagination orbiting the giver of all known life - the Sun. Mike Ashley curates this literary tour through the space around this heavenly body, taking in the sights of Mercury, Venus, Mars, an alternate Earth, strange goings on on Saturn and tales from a bizarre civilization on Neptune. Pluto (still a planet in the Classic period of SF) becomes the site for a desperate tale of isolation, and a nameless point at the limits of the Suns orbital space gives rise to a final poetic vision of this spot in the universe we call home...

Born of the Sun collects one story for each of the planets thought to be in our solar system during the Golden Age of SF, from some of the greatest, and from some of the most obscure, authors of the genre. Featuring the genius works of Larry Niven, Poul Andersen, Clifford D Simak, Clare Winger Harris and many more.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

V U L C A N
The Hell Planet Leslie F. Stone

This is not the Vulcan of Mr. Spock from Star Trek though, like that Vulcan, this one does not exist. But it seemed to, for a while.
     During the 1850s the French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier who, as we shall see, calculated the position of Neptune with pin-point accuracy, was trying to obtain more data on the orbit of Mercury. By 1859 Le Verrier had become convinced that there had to be something else acting upon Mercury to explain the perturbations in the planet’s orbit, and he suggested there must be an inner planet, closer to the Sun, which he called Vulcan. Following Le Verrier’s calculations, the amateur astronomer, Dr. Edmond Lescarbault announced he had seen Vulcan and, over time, other astronomers made the claim. However, their data suggested a planet too small to have a sufficient effect upon Mercury’s orbit, and Le Verrier began to wonder whether there was an asteroid belt close to the Sun. He died in 1877 without having resolved the problem.
     Despite claims by others that they had also seen an inner planet, there were more claims by those who had seen nothing, but it was difficult to dismiss entirely. Any such planet would be seen only brieÌy at sunset and sunrise, and so close to the Sun that its glare could hide the planet. With the advent of astro-photography it became easier to observe the heavens in minute detail. Vulcan proved too elusive and by 1909 it had been all but dismissed. When Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915, it was realized that the immensity of the Sun’s gravitational pull had an even stronger secondary effect upon any nearby object and this was enough to
explain Le Verrier’s anomaly.
     There was no Vulcan.
     But for fifty years or more there just might have been, and its possibility continued to linger in the imaginations of many. The astronomer and meteorologist Donald Horner included Vulcan in his fanciful tour of the heavens By Aeroplane to the Sun (1910), but said nothing about it. The pulp writers took it to their heart, though. It is a valuable source of a rare element in Leslie F. Stone’s “The Hell Planet” (1931), reprinted here. It’s a penal colony in Harl Vincent’s “Vulcan’s Workshop” (1932) and it’s an artificial world in Ross Rocklynne’s “At the Centre of Gravity” (1936) where two men are trapped inside the planet. John Russell Fearn was at his most imaginative in “Mathematica” (1936) and its sequel where Vulcan was not only an artificial world, but the place from which the solar system was created. Vulcan is at its most vivid in Leigh Brackett’s
“Child of the Sun” (1942), with its surface like “splinters of black glass” and its underworld beings of living fire. In the Captain Future novel “Outlaw World” (1946) by Edmond Hamilton, Vulcan is also a hollow world, inhabited within.
     The possibility of Vulcan lingered at least until the publication of Mission to Mercury (1965), a young-adult novel by Hugh Walters, in which our heroes observe Vulcan in its orbit. But the concept has not gone altogether. In “Vulcan’s Forge” (1983), Poul Anderson has scientists on Mercury discover a near molten asteroid in orbit around the Sun.
     The solar system will certainly have more surprises.

Leslie F. Stone (1905–1991) was one of the pioneer women contributors to the early science-fiction pulps. She had trained as a journalist and married fellow newspaperman William Silberberg in 1927 but she retained her maiden name for all her published work. Her  first appearance, besides some fairy tales in her local newspaper, was with
“Men with Wings” (1929) about human glandular manipulation that brought forth winged humans. Her  first sale had been “Out of the Void” (1929) which appeared later, and besides its super-scientific paraphernalia was one of the rare stories from those early days to include a transvestite, who becomes the first female space captain. In fact, Stone should be applauded for challenging the barriers. Her Saturnian hero in “The Fall of Mercury” (1935) is a black man. The society in “The Conquest of Gola” (1931) is a matriarchy that defeats the male invaders from Earth. Stone sold some twenty stories to the sci-fi pulps until the change in the market in the 1940s drove her away. Her work was reprinted, though, keeping her name alive, and in 1967 she revised “Out of the Void” for book publication, but further efforts came to naught. By then she had become more interested in gardening and ceramics and worked for the National Institute of Health. Their gain was almost certainly science fiction’s loss.

Edition details

• Publisher: British Library Publishing
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0712353569
• ISBN 13: 9780712353564
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Mike Ashley