LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS

   Early interplanetary travellers invariably discovered worlds which were markedly akin to Earth. Without a theory of EVOLUTION for a guide, let alone any but the most primitive awareness of ECOLOGY, the imaginative creation of other-worldly life was inevitably a haphazard and arbitrary process. One notable exception is Johannes KEPLER's attempt to imagine lunar life in the last pages of Somnium (1634). There is little in most other pre-20th-century accounts to distinguish other worlds from the strange Earthly lands featured in many travellers' tales and romances (ANTHROPOLOGY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; LOST WORLDS). Camille FLAMMARION was thefirst writer to apply Lamarckian and Darwinian ideas to the construction of hypothetical ALIEN worlds, in Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes reels (1864; trans as Real and Imaginary Worlds 1865 US) and Lumen (1872; exp 1887); and his later romance of other-worldly reincarnation, Urania (1890), offers a description, albeit relatively undetailed, of the Martianbiosphere. Flammarion's contemporary, C.I. DEFONTENAY, gave a comprehensive description of life on another world in Star, ou Psi de Cassiopee (1854; trans as Star 1975 US), but biological speculation wasmuted. Most late-19th-century interplanetary romances similarly feature pseudo-human races and are vehicles for political and sociological rather than biological hypothesis. Exotic milieux are used merely to provide local colour for interplanetary tourists, as in George GRIFFITH's A Honeymoon in Space (1901). Edgar FAWCETT's The Ghost of Guy Thyrle (1895)takes some trouble to convey an impression of the multifariousness of life on other worlds, but does not pause for detailed description. Even H.G. WELLS, a writer whose biological training qualified him to take on the jobof designing an alien life-system, shirked the task; the Selenite society in THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901) is given only the most cursory supportive ECOLOGY. Wells's French contemporary J.H. ROSNY aine was similarly shy until 1922, when he included a fairly elaborate description of an alien life-system in his LOST-WORLD story L'etonnant voyage de Hareton Ironcastle (1922; rewritten rather than trans by Philip JoseFARMER as Ironcastle, 1976).The favourite abode of other-worldly life in early sf was MARS, and an approximate consensus image of the Martian biosphere slowly grew up, much encouraged by Mars as the Abode of Life (1908) by the eccentric US astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916). The reddeserts and the canals became CLICHES but, whether Mars was seen as a decadent world or as a primitive one, its biosphere tended to be somewhat stripped-down. A lush Mars is featured in Edwin Lester ARNOLD's daydream fantasy Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905; vt Gulliver of Mars), the first of many novels to use the red planet as a backcloth for a swashbuckling adventure story, but Arnold and his successor in this vein, Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, were understandably uninterested in seriousbiosphere-design. A similar blithe disregard for matters of rational plausibility is exhibited not only by the great legion of Burroughs imitators - Otis Adelbert KLINE, Ralph Milne FARLEY, J.U. GIESY, Lin CARTER, Gardner F. FOX, Alan Burt Akers (Kenneth BULMER) et al. - but alsoby less derivative sf writers who adapted the underlying philosophy to their own purposes. Leigh BRACKETT, Ray BRADBURY and C.L. MOORE have helped to maintain a calculatedly nonrealistic image of Mars long beyond its natural lifespan, and Bradbury's curious amalgam of impossible romanticism and heavy nostalgia, exhibited in THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (coll 1950; vt The Silver Locusts), remains so powerful that it still affectscontemporary works like Ian MCDONALD's Desolation Road (1988). Indeed, the influence of this romantic image has been so great that it has had quite a marked influence upon supposedly realistic treatments of the planet like Arthur C. CLARKE's The Sands of Mars (1951) and James BLISH's Welcome toMars (1967). Some early GENRE-SF writers did make an effort to introduce more variety and a greater degree of plausibility into their accounts of extraterrestrial life. Laurence MANNING's "The Wreck of the Asteroid" (1932), Jack WILLIAMSON's "The Moon Era" (1932) and Leslie F. STONE's "TheHell Planet" (1932) all show enterprise in this regard, but the story most remembered today as a crucial turning-point in the sophistication of other-worldly melodrama is "A Martian Odyssey" (1934) by Stanley G. WEINBAUM. Weinbaum went on to write a whole series of adventure storiesset against the backgrounds of various weird alien ecologies, but no one seemed able to take up where he left off. John W. CAMPBELL Jr's Penton and Blake series (1936-8; fixup as The Planeteers 1966) is imitative ofWeinbaum but much weaker. In 1939 Clifford D. SIMAK began a series intended to deal in a realistic manner with conditions on each of the planets in turn; of the 4 stories he completed the last, "Tools" (1942), is the most notable. Eric Frank RUSSELL, in the course of his own series of exploration stories-collected in Men, Martians, and Machines (coll of linked stories 1956) - produced the memorable "Symbiotica" (1944), but did little more in this line. Outside genre sf, very few writers tackled the problem of describing life on worlds unlike Earth. Olaf STAPLEDON's STAR MAKER (1937) is admirably wide-ranging but short on detail, save for onelong description of a very Earthlike world. The fullest descriptions of other-worldly life offered by non-genre writers are to be found, oddly enough, in allegories inspired by the religious imagination: David LINDSAY's A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920) and C.S. LEWIS's OUT OF THE SILENTPLANET (1938) and Perelandra (1943; vt Voyage to Venus).The sophistication of post-WWII sf encouraged attempts to tackle the problem of constructing strange alien life-systems more realistically. "Grandpa" (1955) by James H. SCHMITZ is a notable study of a complex marine lifecycle on anEarth-type planet. Conscientious attempts to design ecologies for unearthly physical circumstances were regularly made by Hal CLEMENT, most notably in MISSION OF GRAVITY (1953 ASF; 1954), Cycle of Fire (1957) and Close to Critical (1958 ASF; 1964), and by Poul ANDERSON, especially in"Call me Joe" (1957), War of the Wing-Men (1958; vt The Man who Counts) and Three Worlds to Conquer (1964). Anderson also produced a nonfiction work, Is There Life on Other Worlds? (1963), an early popularization of the speculative science of XENOBIOLOGY - the study of extraterrestrial life. Isaac ASIMOV wrote essays on this subject, and one of its leading exponents, Carl SAGAN, has also written sf. One of the most intriguing nonfictions in the field is Extraterrestrial Encounter (1979) by Chris BOYCE, another sf writer. One writer of the post-WWII period whose name isparticularly associated with the detailed presentation of alien worlds is Jack VANCE, whose interest in alien ecology is linked to a strong concernfor cultural ANTHROPOLOGY. His alien worlds usually have human populations cleverly adapted to and integrated into the native ecology, and his works carefully combine romanticism and earnest speculation (see also PLANETARY ROMANCE); outstanding among his many novels in this vein are Son of theTree (1951 TWS; 1964), Big Planet (1952 Startling Stories; 1957), The Houses of Iszm (1954 Startling Stories; 1964), The Languages of Pao (1958), THE DRAGON MASTERS (1963), The Blue World (1966) and EMPHYRIO (1969). There also grew up in this post-WWII period, in calculated opposition to the romantic school of other-worldly adventures, a school of fiction which represented human life on other worlds as a grim and terrible battle against implacably hostile circumstances (COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS).Popularization in the 1960s of the notion of impendingecological crisis in the real world brought about a significant change in emphasis in sf. The notion of "conquering" other worlds and mastering harsh environments by hard work and sheer determination - which reached its peak in such novels as Tom GODWIN's The Survivors (1958; vt Space Prison) and Harry HARRISON's Deathworld (1960) - found new ideologicalopposition in many stories emphasizing the notion of harmonious order (ECOLOGY). Alien ecospheres possessing such perfection are often depicted,with mankind featuring either as an unthinking destroyer or as a candidate for membership whose case has yet to be judged. Such stories often embody a strong element of mysticism (RELIGION; MYTHOLOGY). The representation of alien ecospheres as problematic Gardens of Eden has since become so commonplace as to be almost ritual; notable examples of the careful extension of this metaphor include Mark CLIFTON's Eight Keys to Eden (1960), Richard M. MCKENNA's "Hunter Come Home" (1963), John BOYD's ironicThe Pollinators of Eden (1969), Ursula K. LE GUIN's THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST (1972; 1976), Neal BARRETT's Highwood (1972), Brian STABLEFORD's The Paradise Game (1974) and The Gates of Eden (1983), Stanislaw LEM's Edem (1959; trans as Eden 1989 US) and Michael D. RESNICK's Paradise (1989). Many of these works echo the forest fantasies of the great pioneer of ecological mysticism, W.H. HUDSON. The 1960s also produced two thorough and detailed accounts of human populations in alien environments which are particularly impressive: Frank HERBERT's DUNE (fixup 1965), with its description of life on the desert world Arrakis, and Ursula K. Le Guin's THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (1969), which describes the life ofhermaphroditic humans on the world of Winter. The scope which sf offered for much more detailed and considered modelling of alien environments was increased considerably during this period by virtue of the popularity of series novels, and, although interest remained focused almost exclusively on life-systems native to planets habitable by humankind, the foundations of various notable exercises in long-term "worldbuilding" were laid down. Marion Zimmer BRADLEY's Darkover series and Anne MCCAFFREY's Pern seriesprovided models for various subsequent endeavours on a smaller scale. Much of this work is so heavily romanticized that it exists on the borderline between sf and FANTASY, being little more realistic in its speculative components than the Burroughsian romances which it has largely replaced, but the most competent writers in this vein of planetary romance bring considerable intelligence to bear on their work; one who has been consistently ambitious is C.J. CHERRYH, whose descriptions of other-worldly life in such novels as The Faded Sun (3 vols 1979-80) and Serpent's Reach (1980) are outstanding.The depiction of authenticallyalien life-systems has always been handicapped by the problems involved in using such systems as backgrounds to entertaining stories. An enormous amount of work goes into the design of an entire alien world, and it is not easy to blend that kind of artistry with the less esoteric creation of sensitive characterization and well-made plots. The most conscientious efforts of writers like Hal Clement and those who have followed in his footsteps - including Robert L. FORWARD in The Flight of the Dragonfly (1984; exp vt Rocheworld 1990) and Larry NIVEN in The Integral Trees(1984) and The Smoke Ring (1987) - run into acute problems in trying to integrate the enormous amounts of information they must get across with some kind of suspenseful narrative; Forward's novel was drastically cut for its first publication in the interests of finding a reasonable balance; its later reissue, restoring the additional information for the benefit of purists, required appendices full of graphs and diagrams. Novels which attempt to present an image of everyday life on alien worlds,without the benefit of human observers - notable examples include John BRUNNER's The Crucible of Time (1984), Brian HERBERT's Sudanna, Sudanna(1985) and Charles L. HARNESS's Redworld (1986) - suffer inevitable problems of reader-identification, and tend to take on an ironic, if not outrightly satirical, edge even if that was not the author's primary intention. Given these difficulties, it is not entirely surprising that the most memorable images of other-worldly life are often highly artificial, contained in stylized narratives whose main purpose is allegorical.

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   See also: BIOLOGY; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; HIVE-MINDS; LIVING WORLDS.