About: Planets in Science Fiction   Sponge Permalink

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Several generations of science fiction plots have been set on celestial bodies other than the Earth, with the Moon and Mars being the favorite locations inside the Solar System during in the early decades of the genre. While the Moon and Mars are perennial favorites as locations, fictional planets beyond Sol System predominated as settings in more recent decades.

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  • Planets in Science Fiction
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  • Several generations of science fiction plots have been set on celestial bodies other than the Earth, with the Moon and Mars being the favorite locations inside the Solar System during in the early decades of the genre. While the Moon and Mars are perennial favorites as locations, fictional planets beyond Sol System predominated as settings in more recent decades.
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  • Several generations of science fiction plots have been set on celestial bodies other than the Earth, with the Moon and Mars being the favorite locations inside the Solar System during in the early decades of the genre. While the Moon and Mars are perennial favorites as locations, fictional planets beyond Sol System predominated as settings in more recent decades. During the first decades of science fiction Mars was probably the most common extraterrestrial location for science fiction stories because little was known about its surface conditions before the first Mariner space probes. Astronomer Percival Lowell's conviction that he had observed canals on Mars was taken at face value by many and writers like Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury imagined the red planet as resembling the American Southwest, an arid world with an elder and presumably dying race. In contemporary science, Mars is now depicted primarily as a planet successfully terraformed by authors like John Barnes and Kim Stanley Robinson or as the location for archaeological excavations of alien ruins by authors like Geoffrey A. Landis. During the early-to-mid 20th century Venus was also a popular setting. Earth's sister planet was usually depicted as a warm, wet, jungle-covered and marsh-covered world where life was plentiful, with often thinly-veiled allegories of the European colonization of tropical Africa or Southeast Asia. Subsequent science fiction stories about extrasolar terrestrial planets have tended to continue the tradition of seeing them as either deserts or swamps. Creativity, in short, has been lacking. Note that the names of planets described in the doctrines of some religious groups, the faux planets in parodies and the hypothetical planets in nonfiction popular science are strikingly similar to names of fictional planets in science fiction.
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