I’m lumping several scenarios together in one thread. Pick one or more, and speculate on what our lives here in the real world of 2001 would be like if they were actual fact. Have fun with this, but try to play straight with the OP and offer valid speculation.
Jules Verne’s Underworld: a vast interior world exists, at least a hundred miles below the surface of the Earth. It is lit by a diffuse light, has a Mediterranean-sized sea and is populated by marine reptiles, mammoths and prehistoric hominids.
Conan-Doyle’s Lost World: a vast South American plateau is a seething jungle populated by dinosaurs and other anachronistic megafauna.
Burroughs’s Barsoom: Mars is a living world of exotic creatures, including many sentient species (some with four arms or more) living in monarchial societies. They have rayguns and other advanced technology, but no spaceflight. To get you started on this one, imagine the Mariner and Viking missions in this scenario.
Stevenson’s “Hyde” formula: a drug really was invented a hundred years ago which enables people to separate their good and evil selves, and manifest the different states physically.
Others that come to mind. I’ve left out Wells, Shelley and Haggard, but y’all don’t have to.
Regarding the Barsoom idea. Maybe that’s what really happened to those failed Mars missions. The Viking wasn’t trashed or found or didn’t see any “body” because it landed in the Martian equivalent of Death Valley or the remote reaches of the Gobi.
This reminds me of the role-playing game Space: 1889. It was built around a fictional world based on the Verne/Wells/Burroughs stories. Following the rediscovery of Cavorite, the European powers get into a “space race” to see who can colonize/exploit the Moon, Mars, and Venus first.
Yes, Lumpy! I remember that game. That is, I remember reading the box at the store; I never bought it or played it.
I was inspired to this thread partly by the recent comics series “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and partly by A Journey to the Center of the Earth, which I’ve just read, and by The Lost World, which I’m currently reading.
I’ll get things going with Stevenson and his Jekyll/Hyde formula. I posit that if it really existed, it would be illegal in the U.S. and Europe, but still readily available. It would be used by otherwise timid, reserved folk to “cut loose” on weekends. People under its influence would account for a major percentage of rapes and murders.
I have this vision of a police officer bringing his little display briefcase to school to give the anti-drug talk. “Yeah, I knew a guy who took these once. He thought it was fun at first, but after a while he found he couldn’t change back…”
The Barsoom idea is an interesting one. Without an easy way to travel to Barsoom, colonization/imperialism wouldn’t be an issue. Major changes would be wrought in both civilizations as a result of the technological and cultural exchange. I would be willing to bet that computer technology would lag as other fronts (for example, anything having to do with radium) were pushed forwards. Remember, the Barsoomians could carry out brain transplants, among other interesting things they could do.
Hey Ben, if you’re going there, you missed one. The constable also passes around a vial of the Hyde formula on a tray so that the students can recognize it if they see it. Either the tray comes back empty, or if the constable has warned them that it’d better come back, the tray is returned full of vials.
My Digging Leviathan is almost complete in the backyard. I plan to enter the Underworld in search of Lost Atlantis within the fortnight.
Next, if I can have those pesky quartz cylinders machined correctly my Chronic Argosy (“Time Machine” to you illiterates) should be ready for a jaunt into the Pleistoscene with gun and camera soon…
Oooh, now you’ve done it - y’all just rattled loose a chunk o’ my brain I’d devoted to a storyline years ago.
It was gonna be about the colonization and terraformation of Mars, but set in the late Victorian era. Something about it set my mind afire… Wow, I gotta go dig out my notes again. Maybe if I get my pen & ink technique worked out by the time I flesh out the plot… oooh, graphic novel!
Thanks, you guys - I need something to do this summer!
What?! You don’t recognize that the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and LSD in general, was a failed attempt back in the 1960’s at introducing the Jekyll/Hyde formula into common use?
Here, I’ll make another supposition. If Jules Verne’s Underworld were real, then descent into it by way of the Sneffels crater in Iceland would quickly become as common as climbing Mt. Everest is today. I can even imagine a town springing up on the slopes of the dormant volcano, if not also a waystation-town several miles deep into the passage itself.
Going inside to find better, faster, deeper passages to the inner sea would become the pinnacle of explorers’ careers, just like seeking the Poles or the Northwest Passage were for so many. Professor Hardwigg and Henry would be quoted in the newspapers when each expedition launched, holding forth on what they’re doing better or worse than they had done in terms of equipment, route or goals.
Specimens would be brought back to the surface, including one of the huge mastodon herdsman seen by the Hardwigg team. Since the timeframe of Verne’s story was right after the question of slavery had finally been settled by the industrialized world, it would be interesting to see what would be done with this primitive hominid.
I picked up The Annotated Lost World a couple of months ago. The supplemental material alone is worth the cost. To my utter surprise, Arthur Conan Doyle’s description of the plateau is not pulled out of thin air! Such plateaus actually exist in the Amazonian jungle. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they contain isolated and unusual species (although not dinosaurs, of course). Doyle even made up his own photocomposites of the plateau.
Such plateaus play an important role in evolutionary biology, since they are isolated from each other and species stranded on them evolve separately from each other.
Cornell maintains an experiment station in (IIRC) Florida, where there are a series of hills that were separate islands at one time. The seas receded, turing the islands into hills, but each one is still associated with its own unique flora and fauna which evolved in isolation while they were islands. I seem to remember once asking a creationist about that…
I actually own a copy of that game. It’s as cool as it looks, actually, although the game system itself is a bit limited.
I love how Burroughs had life inhabiting just about every celestial body, including the sun and asteroids. I can just imagine the Pirates of Venus tinkering with the instrumentation on our probes to keep us from finding out the truth…
Better enjoy those unique biozones before Jeb-boy and the Developers pave them over! But all will not be lost, the cul-de-sac development and mall might be named after some of the flora and fauna that USED to live there!
[/political hijack]
I’ve often thought a Time Machine for historical research would be cool. The time travelling researcher would not be able to interact with the environment, just observe. Also, due to the tachyon fields, or chronos effect, or something, each TT would only be able to make one trip. So choose wisely. I think some of these concepts have been used by other SF writers (Koontz’ travellers in “Lightning” could only make a limited - but more than one - trips)
And, to continue, the shadowy figure seen on The Grassy Knoll in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, was not an assassin, but a Time Travelling Historian, trying to find out what really happened. For some reason, he was partially visible.
