Why Aren’t There More Interesting Planets In Science Fiction?

That sounds a bit like "The Smoke Ring" and "The Integral Trees" by Larry Niven. It's a massive gas torus completely encircling a neutron star that has people and animals living in a weightless environment inside it. Except in that novel the 'air sphere' (Well, more like an air-donut) is natural.

Ian M Banks has a lot of interesting planets, such as the artificial " airspheres" mentioned in Look to Windward, which are inhabited by massive dirigible life forms that live for many centuries.

Also his novel Matter, has a very interesting planet. The Shellworld is an ancient artificial planet consisting of fourteen nested concentric spheres internally lit by tiny thermonuclear "stars", whose layers are inhabited by various different species. They are guarded and mentored by progressively more advanced species.

cheers!

I'll have to look in to that! Thanks for mentioning it!

Cerberus, the artificial planet that orbits a neutron star in Alistair Reynolds' "Revelation Space" is an interesting one.

The layers of artificial crust, mechanized defenses and rock house a quantum super computer, built by an advanced race by collapsing stars into a black hole. ( sorry for the fuzzy explanation )

cheers

I know that story. I've read it. It is Asmiov, I believe, but I can't for the life of me remember the title, and hunting around online now I can't find any reference to it. But, yeah, it was great!

But it doesn't qualify. No CD for you!

I read a short story a few years ago, I think by Varley or maybe Asimov, about some guy who was avoiding being captured by a space ship because the asteroid he was hiding on was small enough that he could walk over the horizon quicker than a ship in orbit could make inertial course changes to follow him. Not really a cool-concept world, but close, and this made me think of it again.

Since you're the only poster to the 'contest', I guess that means you win our lame prize, which is a copy of "The Baloon That Eats Everything" by Republibot 3.0 and the Republibot 3.0 Orchestra featuring Republibot 3.0.

Contact me via the website with an address you'd like me to send it to, and I'll get it out to you.

It's a good point, and one I'd sort of nibbled around the edges of, but hadn't quite yet reached the conclusion you did - it might be that things like that really are better suited for short stories.

In fact, if I'm honest, I've always prefered short SF stories to novels, there's a better "Idea:Length" ratio, and most of my favorite authors first cut their teeth as Short Story guys, not novelists.

In fact, come to think of it, I prefer fictional SF universes based on short stories to ones based on novels, and the number of stories vs. novels in a fictional universe probably affects my overall rating for them: More short stories, the more I like 'em, more novels than short stories, the less I like 'em (Ursula K LeGuin's universe, for instance, is undeniably great, but I don't enjoy reading it much)

Mulling it over, I'm wondering if the really interesting ideas aren't more suited to a short story format. It's the kind of thing that can be explained pretty succinctly (as you proved in that article.)

Off the top of my head there was an 'Ice World' in a recent Escape Pod 'cast (I suck at remembering, well, anything) that had an interesting biology of shifting caverns and hostile clans of lifeforms. (Not sure if that counts as interesting planet, but it was certainly interesting habitat. (Oh. I may end up being the one coding the Known Space probes...))

Ted Chiang's "Exhalation" which aired on StarshipSofa.com and was (I think) reposted this week on Escape Pod (and which just won the BSFA short fiction award!) posited a very odd, possibly created, clockwork universe where air pressure was the stand-in for entropy.

And maybe that's the answer. There's a lot more emphasis on universes rather than planets in particular. I'm thinking now of Doctorow-and-Whatshisface's story about racing to be the last to compute before the heat-death of the universe.

I don't think he got all of 'em, but I think he got all the easy ones. And Star Wars got all the super-easy elemental ones. There's some more esoteric planet concepts he missed - Forwards' "Rocheworld" is an interesting concept (Two planets in fixed orbits so close that thier atmospheres are touching, and you can get from one to another with just an airplane), but a terrible, terrible book. Hal Clement's "Mesklin," And then there's tidally locked planets (I'm writing a book set on one). There's a few other concepts out there, but definitely Niven gobbled up all the fat, easy ones early on making things far harder on the rest of us.

Pretty disconcerting reading that linked article and seeing you had already touched on almost everything in my post. I rarely read larryniven.org (haven't read enough Niven yet) so I'm sure I hadn't seen it already. I guess the complaints are pretty common.

I wonder if Niven didn't just get to all the interesting possibilities first, so anyone revisiting the idea afterward would seem derivative.

Yeah, I thought about the Smoke Ring, but as it isn't a planet, I decided to omit it. I agree it is clever as hell. The Puppeteer Fleet of Worlds is interesting in the way the planets are organized, though there's nothing about any of the individual worlds in the fleet that's particularly unique. Just a bunch of boring old earth-type worlds, though one of them is hyper-crowded.

In fact, I wrote an article for Larry Niven Org here http://www.larryniven.org/knownspace-1.shtml in which I go in to my annoyance at "Elemental" worlds (Jungle planet, desert planet, ice planet, water planet, forrest planet, and so on.) But at least they try something visually different.

I'm not sure if good, cheap FX will make for better, more interesting worlds, though. If you've got to process every shot to show someone in 1/3rd G, just filming someone walking down the street to get their newspaper becomes amazingly laborious production-wise, you know? But I'll tell you what I'd *love* to see, but undoubtedly wont' live long enough for: Movies actually *made* on other worlds! Imagine - just pulling a random example here - a remake of "Gone with the Wind" filmed on Mars, the low gravity adding a poetic air to everything, or imagine "Venus Equilateral" actually filmed on a La Grange station! Maaaaaaan, that'd be cool!

I refered to New Caprica as "Planet West Virginia," because it's just like the weather there in fall.

[reposted by RB2, as either a)RB3 replied on the wrong thread or b)the comments have achieved sentience again and I'm going to have to lobotomize them....]

As you noted, the most interesting planets tend to be from novels, and the least from TV. Obviously, this is due to budgetary concerns. This may change as the cost of decent effects falls.

One of the most interesting 'planets' was actually not a planet at all, but a gas torus, from Niven's "Integral Trees." Then there's the puppeteer home worlds, of course. Hrm. "Most Interesting Non-Niven Planet" may be a better challenge.

A peeve of mine is the single-feature planet. The Ice Planet, The Desert Planet, The Jungle Planet, etc. I liked that in BSG they had New Caprica with a thin habitable band around the equator (and that was still pretty bleak.)