Post Facto Errors
Mar. 10th, 2018 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowThere's an odd kind of amusement, reading older science fiction in which some point - possibly a key point, but it need not be - has been superseded by later events. Usually it's a scientific point, like the Asimov short story involving Mercury being tide-locked, which came out just as the planet was found to be in a 3:2 resonance instead. Sometimes it's a historical event; the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union forced many near-future stories into retcons.
I'm reading the third volume of the Silence Leigh trilogy, The Empress of Earth, and just ran into a different version of the problem. Silence and her crew have finally reached Earth's solar system: "Silence counted, her breath coming more quickly: nine planets and a pale band of blue that was certainly an asteroid belt. Nine planets..." A change in terminology, this time, and a reversible one - or, if one prefers, it could involve the postulated far-distant ninth planet, which distorts the orbits of some of the Kuiper Belt objects. (Silence doesn't see the Belt, or the Oort Cloud either, but the instrumentation she's relying on is based on a very different technology, so...)
I'm reading the third volume of the Silence Leigh trilogy, The Empress of Earth, and just ran into a different version of the problem. Silence and her crew have finally reached Earth's solar system: "Silence counted, her breath coming more quickly: nine planets and a pale band of blue that was certainly an asteroid belt. Nine planets..." A change in terminology, this time, and a reversible one - or, if one prefers, it could involve the postulated far-distant ninth planet, which distorts the orbits of some of the Kuiper Belt objects. (Silence doesn't see the Belt, or the Oort Cloud either, but the instrumentation she's relying on is based on a very different technology, so...)
