I was a little disappointed in Cecli’s column on Planet X. It was solid science, but I was hoping that either the question or the answer had mentioned Zecharia Sitchin, one of my favorite nutjobs, and author of books like “The Twelfth Planet”, “Earth Chronicals”, “Genesis Revisited: Is Modern Science Catching Up with Ancient Knowledge?”. For those unfamiliar with Sitchin, he’s expanded on the hypotheses of Erich von Däniken and Immanuel Veliskovsky, combining the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis (I won’t sully the word ‘theory’ by attaching it to these ideas) with Veliskovsky’s ideas about interplanetary collisions in the early solar system.
I’m pretty sure there’s a great sci-fi story in Sitchin’s silliness, or perhaps even a series of books if I had the patience and drive to stick to my keyboard & type it all out. It could be even better if I throw in a little Lovecraft. Or did L. Ron Hubbard already write those books before he started Dianetics?
I remember a cheesy 1970s SF movie about a near-duplicate of Earth, always orbiting on the exact opposite side of the Sun. Not Planet X, though. And of course since Cecil wrote his column, Pluto has been downgraded by TAstronomicalPTB and is no longer a “planet.” Feh.
Doppelganger, AKA Journey to the Far Side of the Sun. A particularly dumb movie – the Counter-Earh is on the opposite side of the sun and looks exactly like ours, only everything’s backwards, including writing and, to the detriment of astronaut Roy Thinnes, the polarity of electrical devices. The whole movie hinges on this idea of a negative-image counter-earth that it never actually i does anything with. There’s no real plot. A true yawner of a bad film.
That’s the premise of the Gor books, but I’m guessing this movie didn’t have the medieval bondage porn angle.
Sitchin’s Planet X (aka) Niburu takes a zillion years to orbit the sun on an eccentric angle, not on the same plane as th rest of the planets. Most of the time it’s out in the kuyper belt, where it’s kept warm by a radioactive core/mantle or some such handwaving. It’s orbit brings it as close to the sun as Earth and possibly Venus, then back out to outer bumfuckistan for the next zillion years. It’s home to the Annunaki, an advanced, spacefaring race who were recorded by early humans as the Sumerian Gods. They created Homo Sapiens by genteically manipulating Homo Erectus to use as slaves to mine gold. I can’t decide if this is better source material for writing novels or starting a new religion.
There’s actually quite a few sci-fi stories that have featured a “counter earth” that was always on the opposite side of the sun. Another random example: Marvel Comics’ Adam Warlock (best known for his role in the Infinity Gauntlet crossover and its various sequels) spent quite some time on Marvel’s counter earth where he battled the evil Man-Beast.
I thought perhaps Cecil would also mention Vulcan, a hypothetical planet inside the orbit of Mercury. It was postulated to explain irregularities in Mercury’s orbit, but these were later explained by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
There has been an early series of Star Trek books starting soon after the early episodes were aired, containing the adaptations of James Blish, five to eight episodes per book. The first was simply titled “Star Trek” and later ones added a number, starting with -2.
*Note: These generally have been panned by ST fandom. Blish worked mainly from early scripts, and IIRC never once viewed an episode prior to writing one up. There were radical differences from what viewers saw, including key (guest) episode characters perishing instead of surviving or vice-versa. Stiles in “Balance of Terror” and Decker in “Doomsday Machine” are examples. Again, he worked from various stages of the scripts, sometimes only early ones. *
But I digress.
I would invariably get a “blast from the past” reading some of the earliest selections. Not only did he once reference “slide-rule boys” * back home (researchers doing a lot of calculations), but he had Kirk going to great pains in talking to the 20th Century, pilot about Spock’s origin, including disabusing him of the notion that “Vulcan” meant the discredited hypothetical planet inside of Mercury’s orbit. BTW, Vulcan was sometimes given as Vulcanis, although not in this particular novelette.
I know one pronunciation fills us all with giggly glee and one is considered correct or at least less likely to cause people to erupt with giggly glee.
Eight million years ago <okay, 20 years ago> I took an astronomy class where the older professor said the classic giggly “your anus” pronunciation and the TA always said “ooranis” and expected us to do the same.
Classically? Well, then I’d have to go with either “OH ra nuss” or “oo RAH noose”, the Classical Greek and Latin pronunciations, respectively.
Yeah. “YOUR a nuss” is pretty much the standard pronunciation now, as Cecil said. But your post has got(ten) me thinking about why the name was changed.
Most schools teach the names of the planets in grade school, and, with the students’ level of humor, the name of the seventh planet was too big a joke to pass up. The teachers, getting tired of the jokes, started pronouncing the name differently. As the kids grew into college age, they continued to use that pronunciation, and now the rest of us are stuck with it.
Wasn’t there a scene where a character finds himself in his own house on the duplicate Earth, in his bathroom, and he notices that the printing on a label is the right way–in the mirror!!
What I recall is the protagonist’s counterpart superior officer on counter-Earth opening a book in front of a mirror and challenging him to read the reversed image quickly. In other words, they were understandably skeptical of his claims and were trying to test him as to whether all the writing really did look backward to him.
As for the pronunciation of “Uranus,” I’ll just point out that “Jackass” once did a segment on a town in Connecticut called “Mianus.” It is apparently pronounced just as you might fear, with a long “i” and a long “a.” Johnny Knoxville was delighted to be able to say, “Mel Gibson has a house in Mianus!?”
