That’s not the case. One main “character”/antagonist in those books is Gaia, a self-aware, living habitat, shaped like a torus, 1300km in diameter. Gaia isn’t one of the moons we’re aware of today around Jupiter, but is discovered during exploration of Jupiter at the start of the first novel. Almost all of the three Varley novels then take place within Gaia. It’s stated that one of the actual moons of Jupiter, Iapetus, is home to one of Gaia’s offspring, still an “infant”, that will one day boost itself from the surface to become a torus habitat like Gaia. Iapetus’ mention in the novel is a callout to a mystery of the day of why Iapetus was darker on side than the other – it’s because Gaia’s kid is occupying half of the surface.
That’s kind of adorable.
Ugh, I meant Saturn, not Jupiter. Apologies.
The Guardians of the Galaxy (Marvel Comics) includes members from Pluto, Jupiter, and Mercury. How a humanoid would live on a gas giant like Jupiter, I dunno. Not that Pluto or Mercury are believable (for us at the moment, anyway, maybe in a 1000 years when GotG is set) but at least they’re basically just big rocks.
Called the *Lords of Creation *series, although there are only 2 books so far–the first published in 2006. Definitely a tribute to Old Time SF. They would make good movies or, even better, TV series. If only there was a network dedicated to that sort of thing. Oh, look!
Quite a few old-time SF stories presumed that Jupiter was what we’d now call a super-Earth; a massive rocky planet with an atmosphere that was very deep by Earth standards- several hundred miles- but only a small fraction of the planet’s size.
C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet postulates a Mars that wasn’t even accurate by 1938 SF cliche. It was a Earthlike world – no deserts.
The sequel, Perelandra, was set on Venus and was closer to the then-current standard, but postulated the Venus was a temperate water-covered world.
These worlds did not affect the quality of the book. The first was a classic, and the second is rather cliched (though Lewis said he was more interested in the water world than in the story).
Nitpick: Lewis’s protagonist Ransom spends most of his time on Thulcandra in the “canals”- artificial rift valleys miles deeper than the nominal surface of the rest of the planet. Only there is there enough air and geothermal heat to support life.
Nitpick nitpicked: Ransom spends most of his time on Thulcandra in a college… you mean Malacandra.
Otherwise yes - the majority of the Martian landscape is harandra, nearly airless and very cold; it is marginally survivable with breathing apparatus. The rift valleys or handramit are no worse than a fine day in early winter.
Sulva, Earth’s Moon, is inhabited by a strange race where the sexes use sexbots instead of having sex with each other. The far side of Sulva is not as desertified as the near side, which was cursed by Satan (the Bent Oyarsa) when he was confined to Earth.
Rip Foster Rides The Gray Planet is set “five minutes in the future” from the 1950s in a Solar System which has intelligent humanoids on Mars, a habitable Venus with some amusing native species, a Mercury with silicon-based life-forms that make a nuisance of themselves by stealing oxygen from Earth scientists, and several habitable moons of Jupiter.
Wait, I don’t remember anything about that. Was there another story in addition to the three novels, or did I just overlook something in one of them?
In the Empire From the Ashes trilogy, the Moon is a disguised AI-controlled warship named Dahak; it camouflaged itself in pre-history by stripping off the surface of the real Moon to form a false surface for itself, then threw the rest of the Moon into the Sun to hide the evidence.
Floating enclosed settlements. Think the Cloud City from The Empire Strikes Back, except that you suffocate if you go outside like Luke & Vader did.
I did Google that but somehow got the two reversed. :o
From That Hideous Strength, when Merlin is quizzing Ransom to see if he’s really in the know:
Doesn’t appear to be the case. Charlie-27 (the one from Jupiter) was a human genetically adapted to operate in high gravity (the comic says Jupiter’s is 3x Earth’s). You wouldn’t need that on an orbital station.
Outstanding answer!
It’s stated, though (in Perelandra) that Jupiter and Saturn and (what seems from context to be) Uranus are uninhabited: “No feet have walked, nor shall, on the ice of Glund; no eye looked up from beneath on the Ring of Lurga, and Iron-plain in Neruval is chaste and empty.”
The *Twilight Zone *episode, “The Lonely,” takes place on an asteroid that’s something like 9 million miles from Earth. Only 9 million miles? Shouldn’t we have discovered it by now? And oh yeah, the asteroid apparently has the same gravity as Earth and a totally breathable atmosphere.
Interestingly enough, in the first book of the trilogy the native inhabitants of Mars add the -andra suffix to the outer planets’ names, perhaps in the misapprehension that they are “andra”- lands, or solid planets. But the more well informed Oyéresu know better.
Only Glundandra, I think. And it’s just too, too far for me to walk all the way into the next room and check on what that oyarsa is called when he and his chums descend upon St Anne’s.
But of course Viritrilbia, though definitely solid (and never AFAIK imagined to be anything else in the history of astronomy) isn’t an -andra either.
IIRC an episode of Earth: Final Conflict was set on a asteroid like that. The difference being the Taelons deliberately added a force field & artificial gravity to simulate Earth like conditions.
Reminds me of this dumb song.
song:
OH
Written in the stars
A million miles away
me:
So these stars are closer to Earth than the Sun? 93 times closer? And we’re somehow still alive?
Not orbital; something floating in the atmosphere.