First contact (science fiction)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_contact_(science_fiction)

A scene of a first contact between aliens and humans in Robert Sheckley's 1952 short story "Warrior Race"

First contact is a common theme in science fiction about the first meeting between humans and extraterrestrial life, or of any sentient species' first encounter with another one, given they are from different planets or natural satellites. It is closely related to the anthropological idea of first contact.

Popularized by the 1897 book The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, the concept was commonly used throughout the 1950s and 60s, often as an allegory for Soviet infiltration and invasion. The 1960s American television series Star Trek introduced the concept of the "Prime Directive", a regulation intended to limit the negative consequences of first contact.

Although there are a variety of circumstances under which first contact can occur, including indirect detection of alien technology, it is often portrayed as the discovery of the physical presence of an extraterrestrial intelligence. As a plot device, first contact is frequently used to explore a variety of themes.

History

Murray Leinster's 1945 novelette "First Contact" is the best known science fiction story which is specifically devoted to the "first contact" per se, although Leinster used the term in this sense earlier, in his 1935 story "Proxima Centauri".

The idea of humans encountering an extraterrestrial intelligence for the first time dates back to the second century AD, where it is presented in the novel A True Story by Lucian of Samosata. The 1752 novel Le Micromégas by Voltaire depicts a visit of an alien from a planet circling Sirius to the Solar System. Micromegas, being 120,000 royal feet (38.9 km) tall, first arrives at Saturn, where he befriends a Saturnian. They both eventually reach the Earth, where using a magnifying glass, they discern humans, and eventually engage in philosophical disputes with them. While superficially it may be classified as an early example of science fiction, the aliens are used only as a technique to involve outsiders to comment on Western civilization, a trope popular at the times.

Traditionally the origin of the trope of conflict of humans with an alien intelligent species is attributed to The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, in which Martians mount a global invasion of Earth. Still, there are earlier examples, such as the 1888 novel Les Xipéhuz, a classic of French science fiction. It depicts the struggle of prehistoric humans with an apparently intelligent but profoundly alien inorganic life form. However in the latter novel it is unclear whether the Xipéhuz arrived from the outer space or originated on the Earth.

Throughout the 1950s, stories involving first contact were common in the United States, and typically involved conflict. Professor of Communication Victoria O'Donnell writes that these films "presented indirect expressions of anxiety about the possibility of a nuclear holocaust or a Communist invasion of America. These fears were expressed in various guises, such as aliens using mind control, monstrous mutants unleashed by radioactive fallout, radiation's terrible effects on human life, and scientists obsessed with dangerous experiments." Most films of this kind have an optimistic ending. She reviewed four major topics in these films: (1) Extraterrestrial travel, (2) alien invasion and infiltration, (3) mutants, metamorphosis, and resurrection of extinct species, and (4) near annihilation or the end of the Earth.

The 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still was one of the first works to portray first contact as an overall beneficial event. While the character of Klaatu is primarily concerned with preventing conflicts spreading from Earth, the film warns of the dangers of nuclear war. Based on the 1954 serialized novel, the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers depicts an alien infiltration, with the titular Body Snatchers overtaking the fiction town of Santa Mira. Similarly to The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers reflects contemporary fears in the United States, particularly the fear of communist infiltration and takeover.

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke depicts a combination of positive and negative effects from first contact: while utopia is achieved across the planet, humanity becomes stagnant, with Earth under the constant oversight of the Overlords. Stanisław Lem's 1961 novel Solaris depicts communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence as a futile endeavor, a common theme in Lem's works.

The 21st episode of Star Trek, "The Return of the Archons", introduced the Prime Directive, created by producer and screenwriter Gene L. Coon.^[15] Since its creation, the Prime Directive has become a staple of the Star Trek franchise, and the concept of a non-interference directive has become common throughout science fiction.

The 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind depicts first contact as a long and laborious process, with communication only being achieved at the end of the film. In Rendezvous with Rama, communication is never achieved.

In 1985, Carl Sagan published the novel Contact. The book deals primarily with the challenges inherent to determining first contact, as well as the potential responses to the discovery of an extraterrestrial intelligence. In 1997, the book was made into a movie.

The 1996 novel The Sparrow starts with the discovery of an artificial radio signal, though it deals mainly with the issue of faith. The Arrival (1996), Independence Day, and Star Trek: First Contact were released in 1996. The Arrival portrays both an indirect first contact through the discovery of a radio signal, as well as an alien infiltration similar to that of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Independence Day portrays an alien invasion similar in theme and tone to The War of the Worlds; and Star Trek: First Contact portrays first contact as a beneficial and peaceful event that ultimately led to the creation of the United Federation of Planets.

The 1994 video game XCOM: UFO Defense is a strategy game that depicts an alien invasion, although first contact technically occurs prior to the game's start. The Halo and Mass Effect franchises both have novels that detail first contact events. Mass Effect: Andromeda has multiple first contacts, as it takes place in the Andromeda Galaxy.

The Chinese novel The Three-Body Problem, first published in 2006 and translated into English in 2014, presents first contact as being achieved through the reception of a radio signal. The Dark Forest, published in 2008, introduced the dark forest hypothesis based on Thomas Hobbes' description of the "natural condition of mankind", although the underlying concept dates back to "First Contact".

The 2016 film Arrival, based on the 1998 short story "Story of Your Life", depicts a global first contact, with 12 "pods" establishing themselves at various locations on Earth. With regard to first contact, the film focuses primarily on the linguistic challenges inherent in first contact, and the film's plot is driven by the concept of linguistic relativity and the various responses of the governments.

The 2021 novel Project Hail Mary depicts an unintended first contact scenario when the protagonist, Ryland Grace, encounters an alien starship while on a scientific mission to Tau Ceti.

Types and themes

Further information: Post-detection policy § issues, and Potential cultural impact of extraterrestrial contact § Contact scenarios and considerations

 

See also: Rio scale

Due to the broad definition of first contact, there are a number of variations of the methods that result in first contact and the nature of the subsequent interaction. Variations include: positive vs. negative outcome of the first contact, actual meetings vs. interception of alien messages, etc.

Alien invasion

Main article: Alien invasion

The idea of an alien invasion is one of the earliest and most common portrayals of a first contact scenario, being popular since The War of the Worlds. During the Cold War, films depicting alien invasions were common. The depiction of the aliens tended to reflect the American conception of the Soviet Union at the time, with infiltration stories being a variation of the theme.

Alien artifacts

A Bracewell probe is any form of probe of extraterrestrial origin, and such technology appears in first contact fiction. Initially hypothesized in 1960 by Ronald N. Bracewell, a Bracewell probe is a form of alien artifact that would permit real–time communication. A Big Dumb Object is a common variation of the Bracewell probe, primarily referring to megastructures such as ringworlds, but also relatively smaller objects that are either located on the surface of planets or natural satellites, or transiting through the solar system (such as Rama in Rendezvous with Ramaby Arthur Clarke (1973)). A famous example is the 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey, where mysterious black "Monoliths" enhance the technological progress of humanoids and other civilizations.

A number of stories involve finding an alien spacecraft, either in the space or on a surface of the planet, with various consequences, Rendezvous with Rama being a classic example.

Communication with alien intelligence

Many science fiction stories deal with the issues of communications.

First contact is a recurring theme in the works of Polish writer Stanisław Lem. The majority of his "first contact" stories, including his first published science fiction story, The Man from Mars (1946) and his last work of fiction, Fiasco (1986), portray the mutual understanding of a human and alien intelligences as ultimately impossible. These works criticize "the myth of cognitive universality".

Message from space

Main article: Message from space (science fiction)

The "first contact" may originate from the detection of an extraterrestrial signal ("message from space"). In broader terms, the presence of an alien civilization may be deduced from a technosignature, which is any of a variety of detectable spectral signatures that indicate the presence or effects of technology. The occasional search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) began with the advent of radio, which was addressed in science fiction as well. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction mentions a 1864 French story "Qu'est-ce qu'ils peuvent bien nous dire?", where humans detect a signal from Mars. Stories of this type became numerous by 1950s. The systematic search for technosignatures began in 1960 with Project Ozma.

Alien languages

Main articles: Alien language in science fiction and Alien language

Apart from telepathy, languages are the most common form of interpersonal communication with aliens, and many science fiction stories deal with language issues. While various nonlinguistic forms of communication are described as well, such as communication via mathematics, pheromones, etc., the distinction of linguistic vs. non-linguistic, is rather semantic: in the majority of cases all boils down to some form of decoding/encoding of information.

While space operas bypass the issue by either making aliens speak English perfectly, or resorting to an "universal translator", in most hard science fiction humans usually have difficulties in talking to aliens, which may lead to misunderstanding of various level of graveness, even leading to a war.

Jonathan Vos Post analyzed various issues related to understanding alien languages.

Ethics of first contact

Many notable writers have considered how humans are supposed to treat the aliens when we meet them. One idea is that the humans should avoid the interference in the development of alien civilizations. A notable example of this is the Prime Directive of Star Trek, a major part of its considerable cultural influence. However, the Directive often proves to be unworkable. Over time, the Directive has developed from its clear and straightforward formulation to a loosely defined, aspirational principle. Evolving from a series of bad experiences coming from the "interventionist" approach in early episodes, the Prime Directive was initially presented as an imperative. However, it is often portrayed as neither the primary concern, nor imperative.

In Soviet science fiction there was a popular concept of "progressors", Earth agents working clandestinely in less advanced civilizations for their betterment, following the ideas of Communism (portrayed as already victorious on Earth). The term was introduced in the Noon Universe of the Strugatsky brothers. The Strugatskis' biographer, writing under the pen name Ant Skalandis [ru], considered the concept as a major novelty in social science fiction. In the Strugatskis' later works the powerful organization КОМКОН (COMCON, Commission for Contacts), in charge of progressorship, was tasked with counteracting the work of suspected alien progressors on the Earth. Strugatski's novels related to the subject reject the idea of the "export of revolution". In his report "On serious shortcomings in the publication of science fiction literature", Alexander Yakovlev, a Soviet Communist Party functionary in charge of propaganda, complained that Strugatskis had alleged the futility of the Communist intervention into fascism on an alien planet.

Notable examples

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Based on the 1940 short story "Farewell to the Master", The Day the Earth Stood Still depicts the arrival of a single alien, Klaatu, and a robot, Gort, in a flying saucer, which lands in Washington, D.C. In the film, humanity's response to first contact is hostility, demonstrated both at the beginning when Klaatu is wounded, and when he is killed near the end.

First contact is used as an example of a global issue that is ignored in favor of continuing international competition, with the decision by the United States government to treat Klaatu as a security threat and eventually enact martial law in Washington, D.C. being allegorical for the Second Red Scare.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a 1977 American science fiction drama film written and directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Richard Dreyfuss, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban, Cary Guffey, and François Truffaut. The film depicts the story of Roy Neary, an everyday blue-collar worker in Indiana, whose life changes after an encounter with an unidentified flying object (UFO), and Jillian, a single mother whose three-year-old son was abducted by a UFO.

In December 2007, it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. A Special Edition was released theatrically in 1980. Spielberg agreed to create this edition to add more scenes that they had been unable to include in the original release, with the studio demanding a controversial scene depicting the interior of the extraterrestrial mothership. Spielberg's dissatisfaction with the altered ending scene led to a third version, the Director's Cut on VHS and LaserDisc in 1998 (and later DVD and Blu-ray). It is the longest version, combining Spielberg's favorite elements from both previous editions but removing the scenes inside the mothership. The film was later remastered in 4K and was then re-released in theaters in 2017 for its 40th anniversary.

Contact

Initially conceived of as a film, the 1985 novel Contact, written by American astronomer Carl Sagan, depicts the reception of a radio signal from the star Vega. Two-way communication is achieved with the construction of a Machine, the specifications of which are included in the message. In 1997, a film adaptation was released.

Star Trek

See also: Prime Directive

Within the Star Trek franchise, first contact is a central part of the operations of Starfleet.^[63] While primarily depicted in the television shows, it has also been in a majority of the movies. The Prime Directive is one of the foundational regulations regarding first contact in Star Trek, and has been portrayed in every television series. Despite its importance, it is frequently violated.

Star Trek: The Original Series

In the original pilot episode for Star Trek, the crew of the USS Enterprise encounters the Talosians, subterranean humanoids with telepathic abilities, when attempting to rescue the survivors of a crash. While the episode wasn't broadcast in its entirety until 1988, it was incorporated into the first-season two-part episode "The Menagerie".

The Prime Directive, also known as Starfleet General Order 1, was introduced in the 21st episode "The Return of the Archons". In–universe, it is intended to prevent unintended negative consequences from first contact with technologically inferior societies, particularly those that lack faster-than-light travel.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

"Encounter at Farpoint", the pilot episode for Star Trek: The Next Generation, depicts Federation first contact with the Q Continuum, although this encounter was only included later in production.

The Prime Directive is the center of multiple episodes in the series, including "Who Watches the Watchers" and "First Contact". In both episodes, Captain Jean-Luc Picard is forced to break the Prime Directive.

Star Trek: First Contact

Released in 1996, Star Trek: First Contact portrays first contact between Humans and Vulcans at the end of the film. This event leads to the formation of the United Federation of Planets.

An early example of the theme, H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells. It was written between 1895 and 1897, and serialised in Pearson's Magazine in the UK and Cosmopolitan magazine in the US in 1897. The full novel was first published in hardcover in 1898 by William Heinemann. The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories to detail a conflict between humankind and an extraterrestrial race. The novel is the first-person narrative of an unnamed protagonist in Surrey and his younger brother who escapes to Tillingham in Essex as London and Southern England are invaded by Martians. It is one of the most commented-on works in the science fiction canon.

The War of the Worlds has never been out of print: it spawned numerous feature films, radio dramas, a record album, comic book adaptations, television series, and sequels or parallel stories by other authors. It was dramatised in a 1938 radio programme, directed by and starring Orson Welles, that reportedly caused panic among listeners who did not know that the events were fictional.

Solar System in fiction

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_in_fiction

Clicking on a planet leads to the article about its depiction in fiction.

Locations in the Solar System besides the Earth have appeared as settings in fiction since at least classical antiquity, initially as an extension of the established literary form of the imaginary voyage to exotic locations ostensibly on Earth. The motif then largely fell out of use for over a millennium and did not become commonplace again until the 1600s with the Copernican Revolution. For most of literary history the principal extraterrestrial location was the Moon; in the late 1800s, advances in astronomy led to Mars becoming more popular. The discovery of Uranus in 1781 and Neptune in 1846, as well the first asteroids in the early 1800s, had little immediate impact on fiction. The main theme has been visits by humans to the Moon or one of the planets, where they would often find native lifeforms. Alien societies commonly serve as vehicles for satire or utopian fiction. Less frequently, Earth itself has been visited by inhabitants of the other planets, or even subjected to an alien invasion.

History

Ancient depictions

Locations in the Solar System besides the Earth have appeared as settings in fiction since at least classical antiquity. The conceit of journeying to other worlds grew out of the established literary form of the imaginary voyage to exotic locations ostensibly on Earth, typified by Homer's Odyssey. The earliest stories visiting outer space visited other parts of the Solar System—in particular, the Moon. Science fiction scholar Adam Roberts writes that for the Ancient Greeks, specifically, the Moon and Sun could be thought of as part of the earthly realm of the sky, rather than the divine realm of the heavens, unlike the stars; Arthur C. Clarke comments that the classical planets visible to the naked eye as point sources of light were thought of as wandering stars, which made visiting them equally unthinkable. Speculation that the Moon might be inhabited appears in the nonfiction writings of Philolaus and Plutarch, among others.^[ As the literary record from this era is very incomplete, there is uncertainty about the earliest interplanetary voyages in fiction; Roberts and science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz both posit that numerous such stories predating the known ones may have been lost to time. The earliest known example is Antonius Diogenes's Of the Wonderful Things Beyond Thule, which includes a journey on foot that reaches the Moon by going northwards. It is a lost literary work of uncertain date—with estimates ranging from the 300s BCE to the 100s CE—known only through a brief summary in Photius's c. 870 work Bibliotheca. The oldest surviving work of this kind is either of two stories by Lucian of Samosata from c. 160–180 CE: Icaromenippus [fi] and True History. In Icaromenippus, the Cynic philosopher Menippus, inspired by the story of Icarus, attaches bird wings to his arms and flies to the Moon to get a better vantage point to resolve the question of the shape of the Earth. True History is a parody of fanciful travellers' tales—in the story, a ship is swept to the Moon by a whirlwind, and the all-male lunar inhabitants are found to be at war with the inhabitants of the Sun over the colonization of the "Morning Star"; science fiction scholar Gary Westfahl considers this reference to Venus the first appearance of any planet in the genre. After Lucian, the interplanetary voyage largely fell out of use for over a millennium—as did, according to Roberts, the genre of science fiction as a whole a few centuries later at the start of the so-called Dark Ages.

Copernican Revolution

Schematic representation of the heliocentric model (left) and geocentric model (right), where the bodies of the Solar System revolve around the Sun (yellow) and the Earth (blue), respectively.

Interplanetary voyages came into vogue again with the Copernican Revolution, a gradual process that began with the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus's 1543 scientific work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) positing that the planets revolve around the Sun rather than around the Earth and continued until Isaac Newton's work on the laws of motion and gravitation provided the necessary mathematical foundation to fully explain Copernicus's model more than a century later. There were nevertheless some antecedents. In medieval Europe, Dante Alighieri's c. 1320 poem the Divine Comedy visits the Moon and portrays it as the lowest level of Heaven,while in Ludovico Ariosto's poem Orlando Furioso (first version published in 1516, final version in 1532) the Moon is where items lost on Earth end up and it is visited by Astolfo to retrieve the sanity of the title character; Roberts views these narratives as separate from the science-fictional tradition of voyages into outer space inasmuch as they portray the other worlds as supernatural rather than material realms—in particular, Roberts contrasts them with Giambattista Marino's 1622 epic L'Adone [it], which, although it retains the then-outdated geocentric model in visiting the Moon, Mercury, and Venus, nevertheless treats them as worlds qualitatively akin to the Earth. Outside of Western literature, the c. 800s–900s Japanese folktale The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter is about a lunar princess on Earth who eventually returns to the Moon.

The first fictional lunar excursion with a science-based approach was written by Johannes Kepler, an important figure of the Copernican Revolution who provided the key insight that planetary orbits are not circular as had been previously assumed but elliptical and introduced a set of three laws of planetary motion. Kepler's Somnium, sometimes considered the first science fiction novel, was written chiefly to explain and advance the Copernican model. The book describes different populations of intelligent life on the near and far side of the Moon, both with adaptations to the month-long cycle of day and night based on exobiological considerations, and their astronomical perspective: for instance, the inhabitants of the near side are able to determine their location on the lunar surface and the time of day by observing the position of the Earth in the sky and the phase of the Earth, respectively. The first draft was written in 1593, before being revised in 1609 and then expanded until Kepler's death in 1630, ultimately being published posthumously in 1634; Karl Siegfried Guthke [de] notes that this means that—contrary to the perceptions of some scholars—the story narrowly predates the invention of the telescope. Also in 1634, the first English-language translation of Lucian's True History by Francis Hickes  was published; Moskowitz credits this with launching the literary trend of interplanetary voyages, while Westfahl more modestly speculates that writers of such stories may have drawn inspiration from it, and Brian Aldiss, in the 1973 book Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, comments that Lucian undoubtedly influenced later writers but ultimately concludes that the more general trends of the Age of Exploration were largely responsible for the profusion of fictional voyages to the Moon.

As no plausible method of space travel had yet been conceived, these stories employed supernatural or otherwise intentionally unrealistic means of transport, or had the characters visit the remote locations in dreams. Kepler's Somnium, although it depicts the conditions on the Moon in accordance with the most up-to-date science available at the time, nevertheless employs a daemon to make the voyage there. Francis Godwin's posthumously-published 1638 novel The Man in the Moone uses migratory birds to reach the Moon, where a utopia is discovered. Godwin's book was both popular and influential, and inspired John Wilkins to add discussion of the practical considerations of travelling to the Moon to the third edition of his 1638 speculative nonfiction work The Discovery of a World in the Moone, published in 1640; Wilkins's work also contains an early reference to colonization of the Moon, treating it as a natural corollary to solving the transport issue. Cyrano de Bergerac's posthumously-published 1657 novel Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and its 1662 sequel Comical History of the States and Empires of the Sun [fr] depict journeys to the Moon and Sun—both of which are found to be inhabited, with the protagonist of Godwin's novel being encountered on the Moon—using various devices, including the first fictional rocket.

The plurality of worlds

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle and Christiaan Huygens helped popularize the plurality of worlds concept.

In the late 1500s and early 1600s, the idea of the plurality of worlds—that other celestial bodies in the Solar System, and maybe also outside of it, are worlds like the Earth and perhaps even inhabited—was controversial especially in the Catholic parts of Europe because it appeared to conflict with established religious views that asserted the primacy of Earth and humanity; Giordano Bruno was convicted of heresy and executed in 1600 in part for this belief. By the mid-1600s, however, the controversy had subsided to a degree and the topic appeared in the writings of Cyrano and others; by the end of the century, it was largely accepted. Two works played an important role in popularizing the concept: Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle's 1686 work Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) and Christiaan Huygens's posthumously-published 1698 work Cosmotheoros. Both are primarily literary rather than scientific works; Guthke takes the apparent broad appeal of Cosmotheoros as evidence that contemporary readers viewed it mainly as science fiction. There are many similarities between the two works, but they differ in their conception of the inhabitants of the other planets: Fontenelle describes diverse and fundamentally nonhuman lifeforms adapted to the different environmental conditions of the Moon and planets in the Solar System, while Huygens describes beings that are essentially human on the grounds that Earth ought not be unique in this regard. Besides depicting a plurality of worlds in the Solar System, Fontenelle's work also popularized the related notion that other stars might have planetary systems of their own just like the Sun; while it dismisses the Sun and stars as possible abodes of life, it asserts that there are unseen planets orbiting the fixed stars that are also inhabited.

Through the 1700s

Fiction literature about the Solar System continued to mainly take the form of satires and utopian fiction up until the late 1800s; Roger Lancelyn Green writes that the scientific advancements of the time may help explain the dominance of the satirical mode throughout the latter part of the 1600s and the 1700s, while J. O. Bailey writes that the satire "deepened and became more philosophical" in this period, whereas Kepler's approach of adhering to known facts of science was only emulated sporadically. Westfahl comments that up through the 1700s, authors "invariably imagined that other planets would have humanlike inhabitants" and used extraterrestrial locations for social commentary, as opposed to conceiving of truly alien societies as became common later in the history of science fiction. Early feminist science fiction writer Margaret Cavendish's 1666 novel The Blazing World—which describes another planet that is joined to the Earth at the North Pole—contains both utopian elements and satire of the Royal Society, the scientific establishment of the day. Gabriel Daniel's 1690 novel A Voyage to the World of Cartesius uses a voyage to the Moon and beyond to satirize the ideas of René Descartes, showing them to produce absurd results (such as the stars being invisible and tides not existing) and depicting Descartes's spirit as occupied with correcting God's errors. Trips to the Moon serve as vehicles for satire of the British political system in Daniel Defoe's 1705 novel The Consolidator and the South Sea Bubble in Samuel Brunt's 1727 novel A Voyage to Cacklogallinia. Among the rare exceptions to the trend are Eberhard Christian Kindermann [de]'s 1744 story "Die Geschwinde Reise", which describes a journey to a moon of Mars the author mistakenly believed he had discovered, and Chevalier de Béthune [Wikidata]'s 1750 novel Relation du Monde de Mercure, the first novel focused specifically on Mercury.

Cyrano's example of employing rocketry to traverse space was not followed. Various means of transport were explored, but plausibility remained elusive; Brian Stableford, in the 2006 reference work Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia, describes it as "an awkward challenge" and comments that flying machines appeared no more realistic than other means of flight in an era before aeronautics. The planet in Cavendish's The Blazing World is reachable on foot as in Of the Wonderful Things Beyond Thule. The anonymously-published 1690 work Selenographia: The Lunarian, or Newes from the World in the Moon to the Lunaticks of This World uses a kite to reach the Moon, while David Russen's 1703 work Iter Lunare envisions launch by an enormous spring-powered catapult and anticipates the risk of missing the Moon, and Defoe's The Consolidator uses a moving-wing machine powered by an internal combustion engine of sorts. The opposite approach of aliens visiting Earth first appeared in Voltaire's 1752 work Micromégas, where one alien from Sirius and another from Saturn come to Earth, but this remained a rare motif. The invention of the balloon in 1783 made flight inside the Earth's atmosphere more popular at the expense of spaceflight, and demonstrated that exposure to high-altitude conditions is not survivable for unprotected humans, but the balloon nevertheless became a common vehicle for interplanetary voyages, a role it continued to play as late as the anonymously published 1873 novel A Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Paul Aermont among the Planets.

Verisimilitude

By the second half of the century [...] stories of space-travel became both more common and more scientific. No doubt the great engineering achievements of the Victorian age had produced a feeling of optimism: so much had already been accomplished that perhaps even the bridging of space was no longer a totally impossible dream.

Arthur C. Clarke, 1959

The 1800s saw the emergence of a greater degree of verisimilitude in stories about space travel, especially in the latter part of the century. George Tucker's 1827 novel A Voyage to the Moon (published under the pseudonym Joseph Atterley) is the earliest known example of anti-gravity both being treated from a scientific rather than supernatural angle and being employed for interplanetary travel. Edgar Allan Poe was a student at the University of Virginia in 1826 while Tucker was a professor there and is known to have read his book; in 1835, Poe published a story of his own about a lunar journey: "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall". Poe's story contains a mixture of elements that lend credibility to the narrative and whimsical ones, and the preface includes a facetious request for increased verisimilitude in other authors' tales of space travel. A promised sequel to "Hans Pfaall" never materialized, possibly due to the publication of Richard Adams Locke's so-called "Great Moon Hoax" a few weeks later, which claimed that John Herschel had discovered life on the Moon through a telescope. The pseudonymous Chrysostom Trueman's 1864 novel The History of a Voyage to the Moon reuses the anti-gravity mechanism of spaceflight and devotes more than half of its length to the details of the spaceship and journey. Achille Eyraud [fr]'s 1865 novel Voyage à Venus, the first novel focused specifically on Venus, was also one of the first^[g] since Cyrano's Comical History to use a reaction engine or rocket propulsion for space travel—here, a water-based version. Taking Poe's preface at face value, Jules Verne strived to write of a believable lunar journey. In Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon and its 1870 sequel Around the Moon, a vessel is launched into space by a large cannon before circling the Moon and returning to Earth. On the mode of travel, Clarke notes that the initial ballistic launch would in reality not be survivable, and that while the spaceship uses rockets for steering it apparently did not occur to Verne that they could be used for the rest of the journey as well. Clarke further posits that the absence of a Moon landing in the story may be explained by the lack of a plausible way to return to Earth thereafter.

The ascendancy of Mars

Further information: Mars in fiction § Early depictions

Globe of Mars based on drawing by Percival Lowell, featuring the purported Martian canals

The Moon remained the most popular celestial object in fiction, with the Sun a distant second, until Mars overtook them both in the late 1800s. Although Uranus had been discovered in 1781 and Neptune in 1846, neither received much attention from writers. Similarly, the first asteroids were discovered at the beginning of the 1800s, but they made scant appearances in fiction for the rest of the century. Two major factors contributed to Mars replacing the Moon as the most favoured location: advances in astronomy had determined that the Moon was not habitable, while Mars on the contrary appeared increasingly likely to be so. In particular, during the opposition of Mars in 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli announced the discovery of linear structures he dubbed canali (literally channels, but widely translated as canals) on the Martian surface. These purported Martian canals were variously interpreted as optical illusions (as they were later determined to be), natural features, or artificial constructs; Percival Lowell popularized the notion that they were vast engineering projects by an advanced Martian civilization through a series of non-fiction books published between 1895 and 1908. The first novel focused specifically on Mars was Percy Greg's 1880 novel Across the Zodiac, which features a form of anti-gravity dubbed "apergy"; the term was later adopted in many other works—both fiction and non-fiction—including John Jacob Astor IV's 1894 novel A Journey in Other Worlds, which visits Jupiter and Saturn. Anti-gravity voyages to Mars also appear in Hugh MacColl's 1889 novel Mr. Stranger's Sealed Packet, Robert Cromie's 1890 novel A Plunge into Space, and Gustavus W. Pope's 1894 novel Journey to Mars.

Two 1897 novels—Kurd Lasswitz's Auf zwei Planeten and H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds—used Martians that are more advanced than humans to introduce an entirely new concept: the alien invasion of Earth. In Auf zwei Planeten the Martians are human-like creatures who initially have benevolent intentions for Earth but gradually end up acting as an occupying colonial power, whereas the Martians in The War of the Worlds are utterly inhuman and bent on conquest. Both novels had a big impact: Auf zwei Planeten was translated into several languages and was highly influential in Continental Europe—but did not receive a translation into English until the 1970s, which limited its impact in the Anglosphere—while The War of the Worlds is considered one of the most influential works in the history of science fiction and has received multitudes of adaptations, parodies, and sequels by other authors.

Besides Mars, the Moon still occasionally appeared as a setting during this time, though it was largely relegated to children's stories and fairy tales. One of the exceptions was Wells's 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon, which reaches the Moon by an anti-gravity material called Cavorite and places life on the inside of the Moon rather than on the visibly-lifeless surface; the first science fiction film, Georges Méliès's 1902 short film Le voyage dans la lune, is loosely based on both Wells's lunar voyage and Verne's. Venus also appeared in works like John Munro's 1897 novel A Trip to Venus and Garrett P. Serviss's 1909 novel A Columbus of Space, but never reached the same level of popularity as Mars.

Barsoom and its offshoots dominated the interplanetary fiction of the first half of the century.

Robert Markley, Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (2005)

The interplanetary story in general, and Mars in particular, received an additional boost in popularity with Edgar Rice Burroughs's 1912–1943 Barsoom series beginning with A Princess of Mars. Barsoom, as this version Mars is known, is inhabited by a wide variety of exotic plants and creatures, including several different sentient races and an advanced civilization in decline; Westfahl describes it as "the most famous and well-developed Mars in science fiction". This depiction of Mars was inspired at least in part by Lowell's speculations, albeit paying scant attention to the scientific niceties surrounding the canal debate in favour of providing a suitable setting for exciting adventures. The stories and setting inspired many other authors such as Leigh Brackett to follow suit, albeit often using other locations in the Solar System and occasionally even beyond. Stableford comments in Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction that although the subgenre Burroughs thus launched is known as the planetary romance, the extraterrestrial setting was largely incidental—chosen not because other planets were believed to match the fictional descriptions, but because Earth was known not to.

The pulp era

Cover of Gernsback's Wonder Stories Quarterly, Spring 1932, with the text "Interplanetary Stories" above the magazine's title. The cover art by Frank R. Paul depicts J. M. Walsh's novel The Vanguard to Neptune, and the text at the bottom promises "Other Interplanetary Stories" by Jack Williamson, Manly Wade Wellman, and Clifford D. Simak.

Roberts writes that the first half of the 1900s was characterized by an increasing divergence between what might be termed "high art" and "popular culture"—the latter being represented in science fiction by the pulps. The first science fiction magazine was Amazing Stories, launched by Hugo Gernsback in 1926. This is commonly regarded as the beginning of the pulp era of science fiction, though by this time science fiction stories had already been regularly published in pulp magazines not specialized in the genre for decades (for instance, Serviss's A Columbus of Space and Burroughs's A Princess of Mars both first appeared in The All-Story Magazine), and the majority of science fiction continued to be published in general pulp magazines rather than science fiction ones. Gernsback found that interplanetary stories were his readership's favourite kind and decided to cater to this preference; one of his magazines, Wonder Stories Quarterly, bore the text "Interplanetary Stories" above the title from the Spring 1931 issue onward, and science fiction bibliographer E. F. Bleiler notes that two-thirds of the stories in these issues were interplanetary stories, with the vast majority of the remainder being "marginal or related". Moskowitz comments that Gernsback's actions, and his competitors' response in turn, thus hastened the evolution of "what was to become the most popular theme of science fiction".

The 1900s saw the emergence of a new subgenre—planetary romance—in works like Burroughs's Barsoom series. These stories flourished in the new pulp magazines, and the subgenre reached its peak between the 1930s and 1950s. Works of this kind typically portrayed Mars as a desert planet and Venus as covered in jungle. Eventually, the subgenre moved to locations outside of the Solar System.

Westfahl comments that "the 1930s were dominated by space operas set within the solar system", noting that in the catalogue of early science fiction works compiled by E. F. Bleiler and Richard Bleiler in the 1998 reference work Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years, which lists all stories published in science fiction magazines between 1926 and 1936, Mars alone appears in more than 10% of the stories and Venus around 7%.

Works set on the Moon were less common due to a desire to depict alien life and the apparent deadness of the lunar surface, though some writers circumvented this issue by placing life underground as Wells had in The First Men in the Moon; examples include Burroughs in the 1926 novel The Moon Maid, where the Moon is hollow, and P. Schuyler Miller in the 1931 short story "Dust of Destruction". This later became a popular way to dispense with the need for space suits in science fiction films in the 1950s and 1960s. Similarly, deep lunar valleys containing pockets of air capable of sustaining life appear in works such as Fritz Lang's 1929 film Frau im Mond and Victor Rousseau Emanuel's 1930 short story "The Lord of Space"; the concept had earlier appeared in George Griffith's 1901 novel A Honeymoon in Space. Other depictions of lunar lifeforms from this era confine it to the distant past or the far side of the Moon.

Pluto was discovered in 1930, and was relatively popular in fiction in the decades that followed as the apparent outermost planet of the Solar System. Its popularity exceeded that of Uranus and Neptune; Stableford posits that its initial popularity can at least in part be attributed to its then-recent discovery.

Stories involving the four giant planets of the outer Solar System—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—erroneously portrayed them as solid planets. This continued until the late 1950s.

Colonization of the Solar System became a recurring theme in this era. Although there had been a small number of antecedents such as Thomas Gray's 1737 poem "Luna Habilitatis", Andrew Blair [Wikidata]'s 1874 novel Annals of the Twenty-Ninth Century, and Robert William Cole's 1900 novel The Struggle for Empire: A Story of the Year 2236, the motif had not gained traction, and works like Olaf Stapledon's 1930 novel Last and First Men portrayed it as an act of utmost desperation.

This was also the era where stories stretching beyond the confines of the Solar System started appearing regularly; earlier examples had been few and far between.

Space Age

Further information: Mercury in fiction § Tidal locking, Venus in fiction § Paradigm shift, and Mars in fiction § Nostalgic depictions

A clement twilight zone on a synchronously rotating Mercury, a swamp-and-jungle Venus, and a canal-infested Mars, while all classic science-fiction devices, are all, in fact, based upon earlier misapprehensions by planetary scientists.

Carl Sagan, 1978

Advances in planetary science in the early years of the Space Age rendered previous notions of the conditions of several locations in the Solar System obsolete.

Similarly, the success of Apollo 11 in 1969 marked the end for stories about fictional first Moon landings.

The planets of the Solar System only appeared sporadically as settings in the 1970s. Extrasolar locations became favoured instead. There was a resurgence towards the end of the century with themes like terraforming.

Games—both video games and tabletop games—use Solar System locations as settings infrequently, and typically as a kind of interchangeable exotic background element.

Planetary tours

Traversing the various worlds of the Solar System, sometimes called a "Grand Tour", is a recurring motif. The first such story was Athanasius Kircher's 1656 work Itinerarium exstaticum, which also engaged in the ongoing cosmological debate between the heliocentric and geocentric model, ultimately endorsing the intermediate Tychonic system. Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes and Huygen's Cosmotheoros also tour the Solar System in their explorations of the plurality of worlds later in the century, though in both cases the journeys are of the mind rather than of the body.

Fictional components

Further information: Fictional planets of the Solar System

Schematic diagram of the orbits of the fictional planets Vulcan, Counter-Earth, and Phaëton in relation to the five innermost planets of the Solar System.

Various imaginary constituents of the Solar System have appeared in fiction. Outer-space equivalents of the Sargasso Sea appear on occasion.

Additional moons of the Earth

Astrophysicist Elizabeth Stanway [Wikidata] writes that stories about additional moons of the Earth typically provide some explanation for why these moons have not been detected earlier, such as being very small or only having entered orbit around the Earth recently, and that they largely fell out of favour with the advent of the Space Age. In Willem Bilderdijk's 1813 novel A Short Account of a Remarkable Aerial Voyage and a Discovery of a New Planet, a small moon orbits Earth inside the atmosphere and is thus reachable by balloon. In Mary Platt Parmele's 1892 short story "Ariel, or the Author's World" the second moon has evaded detection as a result of constantly being on the side of Earth facing the Sun, while in Léon Groc [fr]'s 1944 novel La planète de cristal it is due to being transparent.