Smilodons on Venus, Ancient Ruins on Mars
Sometimes, you come across a novel, and you run in a circle barking at your own tail (if you are a dog with a keyboard, like me) because you think: Noy Jitat! Why didn’t *I* think of writing that book! What a good idea!
(Note that you only actually think “Noy Jitat!” if you are from Octopon. If you are from Arrakis, the prefered explitive is “Kull Wahad!”–isn’t it simply pathetic that I took up precious braincells memorizing swearwords in made-up languages? Silflay hraka u embleer Rah! )
WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF WRITING THIS BOOK! WHAT A GOOD IDEA!
Best-selling author S.M. Stirling told SCI FI Wire that his latest novel, The Sky People, posits an alternate history in which Mars and Venus are habitable planets. “We find out that they’re inhabited, by human beings among other things,” Stirling said in an interview. “The first hints that our sister planets have breathable atmospheres come in the 1920s and ’30s, but there’s no definitive proof until the 1950s, so things go pretty much as in the ‘real’ history until then. After that, things change! The space race subsumes the Cold War, as humanity focuses its efforts on reaching the nearer planets.”
Stirling added: “By the 1980s, both the U.S./Commonwealth space service and the East Bloc have small outposts on Mars and Venus. The personnel are the picked cream of millions of applicants, but they’re very few and have to learn their way around whole worlds. The Sky People takes place on Venus, whose highest civilization is a bronze-age city-state, most areas are paleolithic, and … humans and other hominids coexist with dinosaurs and saber-tooths.”
The story found its inspiration in the great pulp writers of SF, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett, Stirling said. “They got a much more interesting solar system than we did: lost civilizations on a dying Mars, steamy jungles on Venus, … [which is] much less boring than the baking, sulfuric-acid hell and barren iceball that reality handed us,” he said.
The Sky People will be followed by a sequel set on Mars, titled In the Halls of the Crimson Kings, Stirling said. “Swords, airships, half-ruined cities older than time,” he said. “I’m having a blast!”
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
