Tag: science fiction

EP. 12: H.P. LOVECRAFT’S VISION OF AN EVIL PRE-HUMAN CIVILIZATION

On By AlessandraIn Ancient Civilizations, Books, Reading, Silurian Hypothesis

In a recent post, I discussed the Silurian Hypothesis, which is the possibility that our human civilization is not the first one on Earth. Sci-fi authors have explored this concept in their works for at least a century.

One of the first was Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the author of the Cthulhu Mythos. As early as 1917, he wrote the story Dagon, where the protagonist escapes the German U-boat that sank his merchant ship. However, the sailor soon finds himself on a strange island that “[…] by some unprecedented volcanic upheaval […] must have been thrown to the surface, exposing regions that for innumerable years had lain hidden […]”.

In the middle of the island is a disturbing artifact, an ancient monolith engraved with occult symbols and figures. This human-amphibian mixture fills the protagonist with an inexplicable terror, which only grows worse when a slithering, sucking monstrosity crawls up from the sea and over the monolith. The sight plunges the unlucky man into madness. As a result, he runs away on a “delirious journey” until he wakes up in a San Francisco hospital, where no one believes him, and he’s left alone with the knowledge of the Thing’s existence and what it implies. A Thing so ancient that its existence dwarfs any human concept of time.

Although Dagon is an excellent introduction to Lovecraft’s obsession with vast, inhuman worlds beyond the limit of our knowledge, some of his later works dive even deeper into the rabbit hole of an unbearably old and malign civilization that predates and will outlast humans and their limited, relatively trivial experiences.

In February 1931, he wrote the sci-fi-horror novella At the Mountains of Madness, later serialized in the early 1936 issues of Astounding Stories.

The story is about an American expedition to Antarctica by geologist William Dyer from the fictional Miskatonic University of Arkham. Lovecraft had long been fascinated with Antarctica, though in the 1930s, the continent was not fully explored. As a result, Lovecraft could set his story in a mountainous chain “higher than the Himalayas” (the so-called Mountains of Madness) without fear of contradiction.

The expedition begins promisingly but ends in tragedy and horror after a sub-expedition led by a colleague of Dyer, the biologist Lake, discovers the frozen remains of monstrous barrel-shaped creatures that cannot be reconciled with the known evolution of this planet. They seem half-animal and half-vegetable, with greater brain capacity and super-human sensitivity. Lake jokingly identifies the strange beings with the Elder Things or Old Ones of the Necronomicon, who are “supposed to have created all Earth life as jest or mistake.”

Fig.1: An Antarctic setting in the style of Nicholas Roerich, H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite painter. Image made by the author with Midjourney AI.

Soon, Lake’s sub-expedition loses radio contact with the main party, apparently because of bad weather. However, when Dyer takes a small group of men in some airplanes to find out whatever happened to Lake and company, they discover a devasted camp and no trace of the specimens of the Old Ones, but for a few damaged ones, which they presume must have been buried by Gedney, the one human they couldn’t identify among the corpses.

Fig.2: Lovecraft had a lifelong interest in Antarctic exploration. Image made by the author with Midjourtney AI.

Dyer and a graduate student, Danforth, investigate the mysterious tragedy further by scaling the immense plateau that makes “Everest out of the running.” To their amazement, they find an enormous stone city, fifty to one hundred miles in extent, likely dating to millions of years before any humans evolved on the planet. The subsequent exploration of some interiors leads Dyer and Danforth to conclude that the Old Ones built the city.

Fig.3: A shoggoth in the city of the Old Ones. Image made by the author with Microsoft Bing AI.

Also, by studying some drawings and carvings on the city walls, the two adventurers discover that the Elder Things came from outer space millions of years ago, establishing themselves in Antarctica and eventually spreading across the entire Earth. This is where the shoggoths – shapeless, fifteen-foot masses of gel-like substance which they controlled using hypnotic suggestion – first become important. Over time, these living robots developed a somewhat conscious brain and will, which led to the Old Ones having to deal with the shoggoths’ frequent rebellion attempts. The Old Ones faced more difficulties when other extraterrestrial races, such as the fungus-like creatures from Yuggoth and the Cthulhu spawn, arrived on Earth. The ensuing territorial wars pushed them back to their original settlement in Antarctica. Ultimately, their extinction became inevitable when they lost the ability to travel through space.

Shortly after, Dyer and Danforth discover the body of Gedney and a dog. They also stumble upon a group of Old Ones without their heads, suggesting they regained consciousness after thawing in Lake’s camp. Dyer observes that Gedney’s body was carefully protected to avoid further harm. From this, it can be inferred that the Old Ones were responsible for the destruction of Lake’s camp and took Gedney as a sample. However, the question remains: who killed the Old Ones?

At that point, Dyer and Danforth hear a disturbing piping sound. Afraid it could be some other Old Ones, they flee in terror, but not before they turn their flashlights upon a fast-approaching thing and find that it is “… a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light over the tunnel-filling front…”

But the two explorer’s trial is not yet over. As they return to camp, Danforth shrieks in horror: “Teke-li! Teke-li!” He has seen something even worse than the shoggoth who killed the Old Ones, something that unhinges his mind, although he refuses to tell Danforth what it is.

Although initially portrayed as scary creatures, the Old Ones are the main focus of the story “At the Mountains of Madness.” Eventually, they are overpowered by the shoggoths, who are described as “the things that even the scary things fear.” Near the end, the Old Ones stop being scary. This is a common theme in stories about civilizations that existed before our current one. For example, similar themes can be found in the novels A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr (1959) and The Second Sleep by Robert Harris (2019). The Old Ones have a deep connection with humans, representing a perfect society that Lovecraft hopes humanity will someday achieve. However, they are much more advanced than humans in various ways, such as intelligence, perception, and artistic ability. As mentioned earlier, the Old Ones are responsible for creating all life on Earth, including humans. Nevertheless, they are destroyed by the shoggoths, initially created by the Old Ones as slaves. This illustrates Lovecraft’s belief in the inevitable rise and fall of civilizations.

Finally, At the Mountains of Madness introduces what later became a trope of sci-fi and fringe literature: most mythological “gods” were mere extraterrestrial beings, and their followers were mistaken about their true nature. The critical passage occurs in the middle of the novella when Dyer acknowledges that the Old Ones must have built the gigantic city in which he has been wandering:

They were the makers and the enslavers of Earth life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about.

EP. 11: THE SILURIAN HYPOTHESIS AND ITS SCARY IMPLICATIONS

On By AlessandraIn Ancient Civilizations, Silurian Hypothesis

The Silurians are fictional creatures that appeared in an episode of the cult science fiction TV show Dr. Who. In the story, these lizard-like creatures achieved industrial expertise about 450 million years ago, long before humans evolved on Earth.

In recent years, the idea of advanced prehistoric life has turned out to be intriguing far beyond its entertainment value, raising various exciting questions. Not least is this: if an industrial civilization had existed in the past, what traces would it have left? In other words, how do we know that ours is the first technological civilization on Earth?

Modern humans have been around for 200,000 years, but life has existed on this planet for 3.5 billion. That leaves more than enough time for the rise and fall of not one but several pre-human industrial civilizations. Yet, so far, little serious thought has been given to the possibility that we are not the first species to build a civilization in the Solar System’s history.

We’re used to imagining extinct civilizations in terms of underwater statues and subterranean ruins. These artifacts of previous societies are acceptable if we are only interested in timescales of a few thousand years. But things get trickier once we are interested in “deep time,” meaning tens or hundreds of millions of years ago. It is unlikely that any massive artificial structures would remain preserved through eons of geological activity.

Urban areas presently comprise less than 1% of the Earth’s surface. So any comparable settlements from an earlier civilization would be easy for modern-day paleontologists to miss. And no one should count on finding a Jurassic-era artifact, e.g., the Antikythera mechanism, used by the ancient Greeks and considered the world’s first computer. Complex items don’t last millions of years. The same is true for fossils of beings who might have lived in industrial civilizations. Moreover, the fraction of life that gets fossilized is tiny; of all the many dinosaurs that ever lived, only a few thousand fossil specimens have been discovered. Given that the oldest known fossils of Homo Sapiens are only about 300,000 years old, there is no certainty that our species might even appear in the fossil record in the long run.

For these reasons, Adam Frank, a physicist at the University of Rochester, and Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, have recently focused on what kind of signature a technological species might leave behind.

Fig.1: Intelligent dinosaurs in an ancient technological civilization. Picture made by the author with Midjourney AI.

The best way to answer this question is to figure out what evidence we would leave behind if our civilization collapsed at the current stage of development.

Humanity’s collective activity is laying down a variety of traces that will be detectable by scientists 100 million years in the future. The extensive use of fertilizers, for example, means we’re redirecting the planet’s nitrogen flow into food production. Future researchers should see this in characteristics of nitrogen showing up in sediments from their era. And then there’s all the plastic.

Increasing amounts of plastic are deposited on the seafloor everywhere, even in the Arctic. Sooner or later, all this plastic turns into microscopic particles, creating a layer that could persist for geological timescales. Still, the most promising marker of humanity’s presence is the carbon released into the atmosphere as a by-product of the burning of fossil fuels. This ancient carbon derives from plant life, which preferentially absorbs more of the lighter isotope carbon-12 than the heavier isotope carbon-13. The more fossil fuels we burn, the more the balance of these carbon isotopes shifts. Temperature increases also leave isotopic signals.

So if these are traces our civilization is bound to leave for the future, might the same “signals” waiting to be uncovered right now in ancient geological strata? Fifty-five million years ago, global temperatures rose from 9 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit. This is called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During the PETM, Earth’s surface temperature rose because of a sudden release of greenhouse gases from the Earth’s crust. These greenhouse gases caused the climate to warm and the ocean to become more acidic. Such environmental conditions may have led to the extinction of most of the dinosaurs.
There are also other similar events in Earth’s history. For example, an event that occurred only a few million years after the PETM is called the Eocene Layers of Mysterious Origin. More massive events in the Cretaceous left the ocean without oxygen for millennia.

These events are almost certainly not caused by previous non-human civilizations. The present era (known as Anthropocene) is remarkable because of the speed at which we dump fossil carbon into the atmosphere. There have been geological periods where Earth’s CO2 has been as high or higher than it is today, but never before in the planet’s long history has so much buried carbon been dumped back into the atmosphere so quickly. Still, the PETM carbon isotope spike mostly shows Earth’s timescales for responding to whatever caused it, not necessarily the timescale of the cause. Finding evidence of a short-lived event in ancient sediments might take reliable and novel detection methods.

Fig.2: Two hypothetical members of a long-gone industrial civilization. Picture made by the author with Midjourney AI.

EP. 9: WHY JACK VANCE’S “DEMON PRINCES” SAGA IS GREAT WORLDBUILDING

On By AlessandraIn Books, Reading, Writing

The Demon Princes is a galactic saga that Jack Vance wrote in five installments: The Star King (1960), The Killing Machine (1964), The Palace of Love (1965), The Face (1978), and The Book of Dreams (1979). It draws upon elaborate worldbuilding, which the author introduces in the form of “sources,” e.g., imaginary magazines, scientific papers, and textbooks describing exotic planets, alien peoples, strange rules, and customs. Quoted at the beginning of a chapter, these fictional sources minimize the need for long descriptive paragraphs.

Here are a few examples taken from the first novel, The Star King:

Chapter 1:

From an interview with Mr. Smade of Smade’s planet, a feature article in Cosmopolis, October 1523:

A short Q&A introduces the reader to the concept of Beyond, short for  “Beyond the Pale” or border, which separates the group of solar systems explored and settled by humans from the largely unknown Galaxy.

Most of the action revolves around the adventures of Kirth Gersen, an enigmatic character seeking revenge for the kidnapping and enslavement of his people. To this end, Gersen must confront five cruel overlords, the Demon Princes. The confrontations usually happen in the Beyond, a place, according to Mr. Smade, “frequented by the most notorious pirates and freebooters.”

Chapter 2:

From an article in Cosmopolis, May 1404:

Here Vance introduces Brinktown: “Once the jumping-off place, the last outpost, the portal into infinity – now just another settlement of the North East Middle Beyond.” As is often the case in SF novels, Brinktown seems to be both the name of the planet and the city, the latter being portrayed colorfully: “an explosion of architectural conceits, what turrets and spires, belfries and cupolas… the magistrates are assassins; the civil guards are arsonists, extortioners, and rapists.” We cannot help thinking of Star Wars Mos Eisley: “Not a more wretched collection of villainy and disreputable types exists anywhere on Tatooine.”

Chapter 4:

From New Discoveries in Space, by Ralph Quarry:

“The Rigel Concourse… twenty-six magnificent planets, most of them not only habitable but salubrious, though only two display even quasi-intelligent autochthones.”

When Kirth Gersen isn’t hunting for one of the Demon Princes beyond the Pale, he usually hangs around the Rigel Concourse, the planetary system of the blue supergiant star Rigel. According to Jack Vance, Rigel has twenty-six planets, of which Alphanor – the setting of most of the first novel – is the eighth. Jack Vance based the worldbuilding of The Star King on the early sixties astronomy. However, SF authors should be careful not to be too specific when including real planets or stars in their stories. What was then state-of-the-art knowledge soon became obsolete. It has been known for decades that extremely short lifetimes prevent blue supergiant stars like Rigel from developing habitable planets (before they turn into neutron stars or black holes).

Another good example can be found in the second novel, The Killing Machine:

Chapter 3:

From Chapter 1, The Astrophysical Background, in Peoples of the Concourse, by Streck and Chernitz:

The quotation at the beginning of the chapter partially answers the objections we raised above:

“But the very circumstances which make the Concourse what it is, provide one of the galaxy’s most tantalizing mysteries. Rigel is deemed by most authorities a young star, ranging in age from a few million to a billion years. How then to explain the Concourse, [with its] twenty-six mature biological complexes? [Some] have wondered if the planets of the Concourse were not conveyed hither and established in these optimum orbits by a now-dead race of vast scientific achievement.”

In other words, plot holes in SF stories stretching over several novels can be retroactively fixed with accurate worldbuilding in the next installments. To quote a famous example, this is what happened with some inconsistencies in the Star Wars Original Trilogy (1977-83), e.g., Leia kissing Luke, who turns out to be her brother, and Leia remembering her biological mother, who died in childbirth. All apparent errors were later explained in the “prequels” (1999-2005) and recent spin-offs like Kenobi (2022).

EP. 6: I LOVE HOW FRANK HERBERT BEGINS EACH CHAPTER OF “DUNE”. HERE’S WHY.

On By AlessandraIn Books, Reading, Writing

Frank Herbert’s Dune is another famous novel where some backstory is relayed at each chapter’s heading.

The novel’s first installment is much more extended than the whole Foundation trilogy, so Herbert had more “narrative space” than Asimov to introduce subtle details. 

Each chapter begins with a fictional quote, e.g.: 

“[…] And take the most special care that you locate Muad’Dib in his place: the planet Arrakis. […] Arrakis, the planet known as Dune, is forever his place.” 

(Chapter 1 Heading, from Princess Irulan’s The Manual of Muad’Dib)

The story’s primary location is the arid planet Arrakis, a.k.a. Dune. To paraphrase the ancient Romans: “nomen omen,” the destiny is in the name. In other words, one can already guess that the planet’s environment will be as crucial to the plot as the human characters.

“YUEH […], Wellington […], Stdrd 10,082 — 10,191; medical doctor of the Suk School […]”. 

(Chapter 5 Heading, from Princess Irulan’s Dictionary of Muad’Dib)

Writing about Galactic empires, one must pay attention to the word ‘years.’ The length of the year on Earth (365 days) is not the same as, for example, on Mars (1.88 Earth-years) or Venus (224.7 Earth-days). Dune’s universe extends over numerous worlds, each with its revolution period around the parent star. Thus, to credibly define Dr. Yueh’s age, Herbert had to use an Stdrd (i.e., standard).

“[…] With the Lady Jessica and Arrakis, the Bene Gesserit system of sowing implant-legends through the Missionaria Protectiva came to its full fruition. The wisdom of seeding the known universe with a prophecy pattern for the protection of the B.G. personnel has long been appreciated, but never have we seen a condition-ut-extremis with more ideal mating of person and preparation. […]. ” 

(Chapter 7 Heading, from Princess Irulan’s Analysis: The Arrakeen Crisis)

The Bene Gesserit order is probably what inspired George Lucas when he invented the Jedi order of Star Wars. Like the Jedi Masters, the Bene Gesserit use powerful mental techniques, developed through years of hard training, to engineer Galactic politics according to their plan. For example, one of their purposes is to select the mythical figure known as Kwisatz Haderach genetically. A similar plot device occurs in The Phantom Menace, the first episode of the Star Wars saga. The main storyline has the Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn and his apprentice Obi Wan-Kenobi chance upon a boy who might be the “Chosen One.” This is another name for a Galactic Messiah.

“[…] On the first day when Muad’Dib rode through the streets of Arrakeen with his family, some of the people along the way recalled the legends and the prophecy and they ventured to shout: ‘Mahdi!’. But their shout was more a question than a statement, for as yet they could only hope he was the one foretold as the Lisan al-Gaib, the Voice from the Outer World. […]”

(Chapter 13 Heading, from Princess Irulan’s The Manual of Muad’Dib)

The author’s intent is once again to convey the significance of Muad’Dib’s character. The people of Arrakis call him ‘Mahdi,’ a strongly messianic title. Indeed, ‘Mahdi’ isn’t a fantasy name but belongs to a religious figure of Islam. According to some Muslim traditions, the Mahdi will show up to deliver the world from evil and injustice in the Last Days. Throughout history, various individuals have claimed to be or were proclaimed to be the Mahdi. Among them, Muhammad Ahmad, the religious leader who established the Mahdist State in Sudan in the late 19th century and obtained a famous victory over the British in the siege of Khartoum.

EP. 5: ARE ROGUE WORLDS THE ULTIMATE ABODE FOR LIFE?

On By AlessandraIn Extrasolar Planets, S.E.T.I.1 Comment

The search for extraterrestrial life has captivated humanity for centuries. Countless questions arise in our quest to discover if we are alone in the vast universe. The Drake Equation, a mathematical formula introduced by astronomer Frank Drake in 1961, attempts to estimate the number of civilizations within our Milky Way Galaxy. However, recent scientific discoveries have unveiled a new intriguing possibility – rogue worlds. These wandering bodies, expelled from their original solar systems, may hold the potential for harboring life. In this blog post, we will explore the fascinating intersection of the Drake Equation and the enigmatic realm of rogue worlds, exploring the tantalizing notion of life beyond our home planet.

The original form of the equation is the following:

N = R* f(p) n(e) f(i) f(l) f (c) L

• N is the number of civilizations trying to communicate with us right now;

• R* is the rate of star formation in stars per year;

• f(p) is the fraction of those stars which have planetary systems;

• n(e) is the number of Goldilocks (i.e., Earth-type) planets in a planetary system);

• f(l) is the fraction of habitable planets that are inhabited;

• f(i) is the fraction of inhabited planets that possess intelligent technological civilizations;

• f (c) is the fraction of intelligent technological civilizations that choose to emit detectable signals;

• L is the length of time signals will be sent.

The first three factors are astronomical, the fourth and fifth are biological, and the last two factors are social. There are several issues with the equation. Among these:

(1) The uncertainties are large enough for the astronomical factors and increase as one progresses from the astronomical to the biological to the social.

(2) Most factors depend on theoretical insights of star and planet formation, new discoveries about exoplanets, and varying subjective opinions on the evolution of life and intelligence. The presumed longevity of civilization must also be taken into account.

(3) The equation has many hidden assumptions: a uniform star formation rate (SFR) over the Galaxy’s lifetime and a steady state of civilization birth and death. 

(4) No matter what value one chooses for R*, the assumption is always that a habitable planet must have a star. However, rogue worlds (bodies that have been thrown out of their own nascent solar system) wander around the Galaxy unattached to a star.

This last item has recently awakened great interest in the scientific community.

Theoretical calculations (Imagined Life, by James S. Trefil and Michael Summers, 2019) suggest that:

“[…] the number of rogues might be between twice and thousands of times the number of conventional planets. Interstellar space must be littered with them!”

Also, rogue planets need not be uninteresting ice balls with no life and energy. Lacking direct radiation from a star, a world can be heated by the residual power from its formation and the radioactive decay of elements in its interior. If provided with one or more moons, the planet can draw energy from a process known as tidal heating (which is responsible for the subsurface oceans on some of Jupiter and Saturn’s moons).

All in all, rogue planets can be compared to (Imagined Life by James S. Trefil and Michael Summers, 2019):

“[…] houses whose lights have been turned off but whose furnaces are still operating.”

Interestingly, rogue planets had been predicted as early as the 1930s by American horror and S.F. author Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

In his short story: The Haunter of the Dark, he wrote:

“[…] remember Yuggoth, and more distant Shaggai, and the ultimate void of the black planets… […].”

When the planet Pluto had just been discovered by Clyde Tombaugh (1906-97) at Lowell Observatory (Flagstaff, Arizona), he wrote another short story: The Whisperer in Darkness.

Here are a few quotes: 

“[…] Their main immediate abode is a still undiscovered and almost lightless planet at the very edge of our solar system – beyond Neptune and the ninth in distance from the [S]un. It is, as we have inferred, the object mystically hinted at as ‘Yuggoth’ in certain ancient and forbidden writings; […] I would not be surprised if astronomers become sufficiently sensitive to these thought-currents to discover Yuggoth when the Outer Ones wish them to do so. But Yuggoth, of course, is only the stepping-stone. The main body of the beings inhabits strangely organised abysses wholly beyond the utmost reach of any human imagination.”

And also:

“[…] Those wild hills are surely the outpost of a frightful cosmic race – as I doubt all the less since reading that a new ninth planet has been glimpsed beyond Neptune, just as those influences had said it would be glimpsed. Astronomers, with a hideous appropriateness they little suspect, have named this thing ‘Pluto.’ I feel, beyond question, that it is nothing less than nighted Yuggoth […].”

What would life be like on a rogue planet?

According to Imagined Life, by J.S. Trefil and M. Summers:

“It’s dark. Not midnight-on-a-side-street dark, but trapped-in-a-cave dark. And no wonder—there’s no sun in the sky, for this is a rogue world, one that circles no star. There is a moon up there somewhere, but without a source of light for it to reflect, it’s just a darker patch in the sky. Whatever life forms live on this planet had better be able to see in infrared because there’s simply no other light to be had. You’re wearing infrared sensors, fortunately, and you spot a few of these creatures scurrying back to the planet’s subterranean tunnels, where they can bask in the heat emanating from the planet’s interior. […]”

Life on a dark planet has been described by British author Arthur C. Clarke in his 1950 short story: A Walk in the Dark:

“[…] Here at the edge of the Galaxy, the stars were so few and scattered that their light was negligible. […]” 

“[…] Here at this outpost of the Universe, the sky held perhaps a hundred faintly gleaming points of light, as useless as the five ridiculous moons on which no one had ever bothered to land. […]” 

“[…] No one could deny that the tunnels out in the wasteland were rather puzzling, but everyone believed them to be volcanic vents. Though, of course, life often crept into such places. With a shudder, he remembered the giant polyps that had snared the first explorers of Vargon III […]

The Drake Equation is not meant to give a precise answer but to stimulate scientific discussion and exploration. It is based on several factors that affect the likelihood of finding intelligent life, such as the rate of star formation, the fraction of stars with planets, the fraction of planets suitable for life, and the fraction of civilizations that develop radio technology. Each factor is multiplied by the previous one, resulting in the number of detectable civilizations in our galaxy. However, many of these factors are uncertain, and different assumptions can lead to different outcomes. For example, some estimates suggest that there could be millions of civilizations in our Galaxy, while others suggest that we might be the only one.

According to a recent study, under the strictest set of assumptions, where life forms between 4.5 billion and 5.5 billion years after star formation, there are likely between four and 211 civilizations in the Milky Way today capable of communicating with others, with 36 the most likely figure. Another study yielded two main results: an optimistic one and a pessimistic one. In the optimistic situation, the researchers suggested the aforementioned 42,777 communicating extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations (CETIs) with an error margin of plus 267 and minus 369, and they would need to survive 2,000 years on average to communicate with us.

The Drake Equation is a fascinating way to explore the possibilities of extraterrestrial life and communication. It helps us understand what we know and don’t know about our place in the universe. It also inspires us to keep searching for signs of other civilizations and to wonder what they might be like.

Read more about this topic in this post and this other post.

EP. 1: SF WORLDBUILDING: HOW ASIMOV’S “FOUNDATION” FEEDS BACKSTORY TO THE READER

On By AlessandraIn Books, Reading, Writing

A compelling SF worldbuilding cannot be done without delivering some backstory at the novel’s beginning. This must be done as early as possible without giving away too much and trying not to bore the readers. 

According to On Writing and Worldbuilding, Volume I, by Timothy Hickson:

“[In] Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone […] J.K. Rowling introduces every major concept and virtually every major character in the story with well-hidden expository writing.”

With all due respect for J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series, I don’t agree that ‘expository writing’ must necessarily be hidden.

I can quote a few great SF classics where a nice chunk of information is in plain view right in the first page’s heading. It may take the form of a journal excerpt, a quotation from an encyclopedia, or even an interview with one of the secondary characters.

Here are a few examples: 

(1) Foundation, Isaac Asimov:

“HARI SELDON— … born in the 11,988th year of the Galactic Era; died 12,069. […] Born to middle-class parents on Helicon, Arcturus sector […].” From the ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA.

And a few lines below, just after the incipit:

“[…] There were nearly twenty-five million inhabited planets on the Galaxy then, and not one but owed allegiance to the Empire whose seat was on Trantor.”

From these few words, the reader can already learn a lot about the tone and setting of the story:

— It’ll be about a Galactic Empire. The plot will unfold in a nation-state encompassing most of the Galaxy’s habitable planets.

In technical jargon, a Galactic Empire is what astronomers call a Kardashev Type III civilization, which is “a civilization in possession of energy on the scale of its galaxy” (M.M. Cirkovic, 2015);

— It’ll be about a long-lasting human civilization. Isaac Asimov’s future human society survived the so-called Great Filter. As explained in the book Exoplanets by Michael Summers and James Trefil:

“[…] there really doesn’t seem to be anything at all special about the way that life developed on Earth, and given the abundance of planets out there, there is no reason that complex life shouldn’t be quite common. On the other hand, from what we know about the process of evolution, we can expect the winners of the evolutionary game on other planets to be no more benevolent than Homo Sapiens. In this case, the [coming] Great Filter is easy to see. Once an aggressive, warlike species discovers science, they are likely to turn their discoveries against one another and, in essence, wipe themselves out. […]”

— It’ll involve interstellar and faster-than-light (FTL) travel. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is loosely based on Gibbon‘s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In his monumental work, the XVII century English historian stressed Roman roads’ importance in ensuring efficient communications between the central authority and the dozens of provinces of an enormous Empire. The Galactic analog of Roman roads is, of course, hyperspace. Asimov was one of the first SF authors to use this plot device to sidestep the long time required for interstellar journeys.

Find out more about relaying the backstory in a novel in this post and this post.