Mercury in fiction

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A popular setting for science fiction writers, there are many examples of the planet Mercury in fiction. Recurring themes include the dangers of being exposed to solar radiation and the possibility of escaping excessive radiation by staying within the planet's slow-moving terminator (the boundary between day and night). Another recurring theme is autocratic governments, perhaps because of an association of Mercury with hot-temperedness.

Contents 1 Literature 2 Film and television 3 Games 4 Other

[edit] Literature

• In Eric Rucker Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros (1922), the action takes place in a fantasy world that is ostensibly part of the planet Mercury. However, the name is used purely for its exotic value, and there is no attempt to make the characteristics of the world correspond to any facts known or believed about Mercury in the 1920s, e.g., Eddison's Mercury has a normal length of day and night, has a moon, and a calendar identical to Earth's; in fact resembles Earth in all respects except in details of geography.

• In H. P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time (1936), the author briefly mentions the planet:

Later, as the Earth's span closed, the transferred minds (of the Great Race of Yith) would again migrate through time and space —to another stopping place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury.

• In Leigh Brackett's short stories (especially The Demons of Darkside (1941), A World is Born (1941), Cube from Space (1942), and Shannach – the Last (1952)), a tidally locked Mercury features a "Twilight Belt" exposed to dangerous variations in heat and cold and havoc-wreaking solar storms. Some of Brackett's most colorful characters, like Jaffa Storm (Shadow Over Mars) and Eric John Stark were Mercury-born.

• In Isaac Asimov's stories, Mercury appears several times as a setting. Asimov wrote all of these stories before astronomers knew that the planet was not tidally locked; in each story, he portrays Mercury as having a permanent day-side and night-side.
  • Runaround (Astounding Science Fiction, 1942, later published in the 1950 collection I, Robot) involves a robot specially designed to cope with the intense solar radiation on the planet.
  • The Dying Night (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1956) is a murder mystery in which astronomers from Mercury, the Moon, and a fictitious space station are implicated in a murder. The dynamics and living conditions of each of these locations is key to discovering which astronomer is guilty.
  • Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury (1956), a juvenile novel.

• In Arthur C. Clarke's Islands in the Sky (1952), there is a description of a strange creature that lives on what was then believed to be the permanently dark nightside with only occasional visits to the twilight zone.

• In Alan E. Nourse's short story 'Brightside Crossing' (Galaxy, 1956), a survivor of an attempt to cross Mercury's sun-facing hemisphere, which had become the ultimate sporting feat, narrates the story.

• In Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan (1959), mindless creatures called harmoniums inhabit the caves of Mercury.

• In Gordon R. Dickson's Necromancer (1962), a base was located on Mercury, used by the Chantry Guild for training beginners into the group.

• In Larry Niven's The Coldest Place (1964), an early short story, Niven teases the reader, who is told that the scene is "the coldest place in the Solar System" and assumes it to be Pluto - only to discover in the end that the actual location is the dark side of Mercury. The story was written when the theory of Mercury being tidally locked with the Sun still prevailed, but was published just after the planet was found to actually rotate in a 2:3 resonance.

• Ray Cummings' Tama, Princess of Mercury (1966).

• In Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama (1973), Mercury is ruled by a hot-tempered government of metal miners that tries to destroy the alien spacecraft Rama. The novel shares its background of a colonized Solar System with several others, especially Imperial Earth.

• In Kim Stanley Robinson's novels and short stories, especially Mercurial in The Planet on the Table (1986) and Blue Mars (1996), Mercury is the home of a vast city called Terminator. To avoid the dangerous solar radiation, the city rolls around the planet's equator on tracks, keeping pace with the planet's rotation so that the Sun never rises fully above the horizon. The motive power comes from solar heat expanding the rails on the day side. The city is ruled by an autocratic dictator called the Lion of Mercury.

• In Warren Ellis' and Darick Robertson's Transmetropolitan (1997-2002), a cyberpunk comic book series, Mercury is referred to as being covered with solar panels, to aid in the power needs of a technologically advanced Earth.

• In Ben Bova's Mercury (2005), part of his Grand Tour series, the story is specifically about the human drama involved in the exploration of Mercury -- why people might be interested in going there (for instance, to harness the intense solar energy that close to the sun), and what challenges there would be.

• In David Brin's Sundiver, the characters spend most of the time in Mercury, between expeditions into the Sun's Chromosphere.

[edit] Film and television

The planet has also been a setting for several television series:

• In Space Patrol (1962 TV series) - episode The Fires of Mercury - Professor Heggarty's device for translating the language of ants also converts heat waves into radio waves. Maria realises that this might provide a way of transmitting warmth from Mercury to the Colony on Pluto, where freezing conditions worsen as the dwarf planet nears the point in its orbit farthest from the Sun.
• In a Star Trek: Voyager show-within-a-show, The Adventures of Captain Proton (first appearing in Night in 1998), Dr. Chaotica was a villain who wanted to conquer the people of Earth and force them to work in the mines of Mercury.
• In the Sailor Moon metaseries, the Ami Mizuno character transforms into Sailor Mercury, the Soldier of Water and Ice. She, in the manga version of the story and in only a line spoken by Luna in the original and dub anime, is also the princess of the planet.
• In the animated television series Exosquad (1993-1995), Mercury served as Exofleet's temporary base during the reconquest of the Homeworlds (Venus, Earth, and Mars).
• An episode of Futurama had Mercury's circumference faithfully represented by a "road sign" giving distance to the only vehicle service station on the planet, where Fry and Amy are stuck when her vehicle runs out of fuel.
• In the television show Invader Zim (2001), Mercury is turned into a prototype giant spaceship by the extinct Mercurites.

[edit] Games

• In the "Golden Sun" role-playing game series for the Game Boy Advance, Mercury is the ruling planet for water-based Psynergy and Djinn.

• In the Transhuman Space roleplaying books by Steve Jackson Games, Mercury is used for production of antimatter and the mining of metals.

[edit] Other

Bill Watterson's comic strip Calvin and Hobbes included a story extended across several daily strips, in which Calvin and his classmate Susie must give a presentation about Mercury to their class. Calvin's contribution, typically, is replete with "creative liberties":

The planet Mercury is named for a Roman god with winged feet. Mercury is the god of commerce, travel, thievery, eloquence and many more things; for details see Mercury (mythology)