Return - Book III of the Five Worlds Trilogy (25 page)
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Authors: Al Sarrantonio
Tags: #Science Fiction
For those interested in some of the other factual inspirations behind these fictions, there are various sources to turn to.
There are many wonderful books on the Solar System as an entity; those interested in a good overview might turn to Nigel Henbest’s The Planets: A Guided Tour of Our Solar System Through the Eyes of America’s Space Probes (Viking Press) or J. Kelly Beattie and Andrew Chaildn’s excellent The New Solar System (Sky Publishing).
There are numerous books on the individual planets; any good library should provide examples that give enjoyment as well as scholarship, though the present author will single out two to look for, since they are not only great reads but concern some of our Solar System’s non-readily observable worlds: The Discovery of Neptune by Morton Grosser (Dover) and Out of the Darkness: The Planet Pluto (Stackpole) by Patrick Moore and Clyde W. Tombaugh. Both of these books read almost like detective stories; both will give pleasure. The present author had the honor to meet Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of the planet Pluto, in 1987.
Since Mars is a special case, it gets special mention. Among the hundreds of volumes on the Red Planet, an interested reader might seek out the following: Mars by Percival Lowell (which, though presented as fact, reads like science fiction), The Surface of Mars by Michael Carr (Yale), a picture book and Martian geology text in one, and, especially, the NASA Viking Mission volume The Martian Landscape, which comes with a gallery of 3-D images, along with a viewer to study them with.
The advent of the personal computer, with its attendant wonder the CD-ROM, has brought newer resources. Mars Rover (Rom-Tech) sets the user down at specific computer-recreated points on the Red Planet’s surface, then provides a mobile tour: the effect is magical. Mars Explorer and Venus Explorer (Virtual Reality Laboratories, Inc.) provide surface maps (in the case of Mars, Viking orbiter photos; for Venus, Magellan spacecraft radar images) of their respective planets. Solar System Explorer (Mans) has flaws, but includes useful computer generated surface maps of many of the planets and their moons, such as Jo.
The present author took many and obvious liberties with terraforming, since it is a science waiting for a future. If the occasional physical law was violated, it was never without good reason, and always in service to the story.
The worlds of our Solar System are out there, whether in our imaginations, through our telescopes or, someday, underfoot.
They are dreams, now; whether we make of them nightmares is up to us.
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