It was our own fault, really

OT: Something beautifully obsolete. by Huinesoron on 2019-10-07 16:06:00 UTC Reply

From a copy of 'The Worlds of Space: A Series of Popular Articles on Astronomical Subjects', dated 1894:

"1. Are the planets habitable?

"I do not ask, Are the planets inhabited? That is a question to which an answer will probably never be vouchsafed to man. Even in the case of our nearest celestial neighbour, the Moon, the highest power of our largest telescopes would fail to reveal the existence of any living creatures on its surface. Animals the size of elephants, or even as large as the gigantic saurians of geological times, would be quite invisible in the giant telescope of the Lick Observatory. Large cities, or buildings of great extent - if they existed - might possibly be discerned, and thus afford evidence of the existence of intelligent beings. But this only on the Moon. All the planets are much too distant to enable us to see anything but marking on their discs, these markings being only dimly visible on most of them..."

Discovered in - get this - Baggins' second-hand bookshop yesterday. I didn't buy it, because it cost £25, but you'll be delighted to know that the entire book is available through archive.org. (The author's answer to the question of whether the planets are habitable, incidentally, appears to be a hard no.)

-- and I've just found that he engages in a glorious display of snark, at the beginning of chapter 3:

"The question is often asked, Are the stars inhabited? To this we can confidently answer, No. The stars themselves are certainly not habitable by any forms of life with which we are familiar."

hS

Inhabited stars by Tomash on 2019-10-07 18:44:00 UTC Reply

The bit about life on stars being rather unlike anything we would recognize reminded me of Dragon's Egg a nice bit of rather hard sci-fi (having checked, it has a technical appendix even for the people who care) about a species of aliens living on a neutron star. Among other things, they're very flat, only really have bones temporarily (they prefer flowing around), and find it much easier to move (IIRC) east-west than north-south, due to the magnetic fields.

- Tomash

Wooow. =O /fascinated chin-hands by S.M.F. on 2019-10-08 16:32:00 UTC Reply

Though, that title just makes me think of the horror story where all the planets are themselves eggs. "The Sun's Children", or summat like that...

Horror stories where things are eggs... by Huinesoron on 2019-10-08 16:52:00 UTC Reply

... is apparently a whole thing. At least, I have vivid memories of being terrified by a book where the cover was a planet-scale blue egg cracking open to reveal red light inside.

... now I want to know what it was. If only so that I can avoid ever reading it again.

hS

If you do find it, pass it to me. by S.M.F. on 2019-10-08 16:55:00 UTC Reply

Though sometimes I'm too much of a Nightmare Fetishist for my own good... XD

Isn't there an episode of Doctor Who like that? by Neshomeh on 2019-10-08 17:21:00 UTC Reply

I think it was the moon that was an egg for some giant space creature. And it hatched, or at least started to.

And, IIRC, there were no massive consequences on Earth, and it was never mentioned again, because physics and continuity are for rubes. {= P

~Neshomeh has always wanted to like Doctor Who but has trouble overlooking these things.

We Do Not Talk About That. by Huinesoron on 2019-10-08 19:49:00 UTC Reply

That... travesty of an episode was called Kill the Moon, and offended me on SO many levels. I'm torn over whether the worst part was 'the thing inside the egg is growing and so gravity is increasing at the surface', 'all of humanity voted to kill it but Clara said no so we still have faith in humanity', or 'it laid another egg identical down to the least crater'.

Series Eight was a very frustrating series for me; it contained utter rubbish like that and 'Robots of Sherwood', but also fantastic episodes like 'Time Heist' and 'Listen'.

~

Doing a bit of hunting around, it looks like the story S.M.F. is thinking of might have been Born of the Sun, by Jack Williamson. This discussion says there's a similar story called And Lo! The Bird! by Nelson S. Bond. I don't think either of them are mine, though.

There are only a few books that I remember being properly scared of as a kid. This was one. Another was a ghost story set during the Blitz. And the third was Robert Swindells' Inside the Worm.

I probably still have all three of them...

hS

Robots Of Sherwood was far worse IMO. by Scapegrace on 2019-10-09 00:27:00 UTC Reply

At least Kill The Moon had cool monsters at first. You can't sit there with a straight face and tell me "The Moon is full of spiders" isn't an amazing premise for an episode of Doctor Who. The spiders themselves were really well designed too!

Yeah, the rest of the episode was garbage, but Robots Of Sherwood was all garbage. I'll take the lesser of two weevils there, methinks. =]

Can I nominate the entire Moffat-era Silence metaplot by Thoth on 2019-10-09 00:36:00 UTC Reply

The silence are cool, to be clear. But that plot is... so, so stupid. And it just keeps getting stupider and stupider and stupider...

It was our own fault, really by Scapegrace on 2019-10-09 02:03:00 UTC Reply

We let Moffat do long-running arcs without adult supervision, and then we made him end them. We know what happens when Moffat ends a long-running arc. Look at Jekyll. That was a complete waste of everyone's time. Was anyone really surprised that the end of the Silence arc felt like it had been scrawled out on a napkin five minutes before filming finished?

Steven Moffat is the kind of writer who's great at middles. He can string people along and keep them interested like the best of them. Beginnings? They're hit or miss. Endings? He has never, ever written a good one for a long-form story. When he's writing for a one- or two-part story and has oversight in the process, the results are very good indeed - there was a reason we were all fine with him taking the reins from Uncle Rusty at first, and let's be honest it was mostly Blink and The Empty Child. But we let him take the reins and gave him not the merest hint of oversight, which is like being surprised at plunging into a ravine when you gave the hovercraft's controls to a penguin.

We've only ourselves to blame, really. We expected too much of his extremely limited skillset.

To be fair... by Iximaz on 2019-10-09 00:28:00 UTC Reply

"Robots of Sherwood" did give us the Doctor sword-fighting with a spoon, so it wasn't all bad. :P

Okay, yeah, I'll grant you that one. (nm) by Scapegrace on 2019-10-09 02:03:00 UTC Reply