Friday 30 August 2024

On the Inspirational Power of Mercurial Place Names

Because I am a very busy, dedicated and hardworking employee and involved family man, I spend a lot of time dicking around on wikipedia, looking at articles about things like the geological features of the planet Mercury. (The genealogy of the thought process that got me there, since you asked, was that I was idly wondering whether anybody had ever speculated whether Mercury had any moons, on the basis that 'the vanished moon of Mercury' would be a cool idea for a campaign setting. It still would be, but, alas!, there was never a time when the ancient Greeks, Toltecs, Bugulmara astronomers at NASA peered at the heavens and imagined there to be a satellite of that sun-blasted rock.)

Anyway, Mercury has a lot of potential as a diamond-hard SF setting, of course (it has a shit-ton of ice, to use the technical term, concealed in permanently-shadowed craters on its poles - prime locations for human colonists to set up bases and thereby become targets for The Thing, Sam Neill, alien facehuggers, or a mad AI voiced by Kevin Spacey). But looking at the place names conjures entirely different images of planetary romance in the mind - more in keeping with E. R. Eddison's Worm Ouroboros, where Mercury is imagined to be something like a more vivid and dramatic version of Earth, filled with strange monsters, magnificent wilderness scenery, and declamatory speeches. From the wikipedia page in question:

Different types of features are named after different things: Mercurian ridges are called dorsa, and are named after astronomers who made detailed studies of the planet; valleys are called valles, and are named after ancient abandoned cities, towns, and settlements; crater chains are called catenae and are named after radio telescope facilities; plains are called planitiae, and most are named after mythological names associated with Mercury; escarpments are called rupes and are named after the ships of famous explorers; long, narrow depressions are called fossae and are named after works of architecture; bright spots are called faculae and are named after the word snake in various languages.

It is one thing for an alien planet to have mountains, valleys, craters, and plains. It is something else again for it to have dorsa, valles, catenae, planitiae, rupes, fossae and faculae. But the specific names are even better (the rupes, because they are named after ships, being probably my favourites). Gaze in wonder at the landscape that emerges in the mind's eye when imagining what it would be like to see, in the distance, the following:

  • Adventure Rupes ('nuff said)
  • Blossom Rupes (pseudo-Mercurial pseudo-Japan?)
  • La Dauphine Rupes (pseudo-Mercurial pseudo-Sun King)
  • Hero Rupes
  • Paramour Rupes 
  • Pourquoi-Pas Rupes (because, why not?)
  • Terror Rupes
  • Goldstone Catena (the chain of craters that sparked a gold rush)
  • Haystack Catena
  • Nzoka Facula (just because it sounds like something Eddison himself might have made up)
  • Pantheon Fossae 
  • Schiaparelli Dorsum
  • Odin Planitia 

The Pourquoi-Pas Rupes is such a brilliant title for a D&D module that I can hardly stand not to begin writing it immediately, but you also have to love Terror Rupes and the sheer poetry of Schiaparelli Dorsum. What wonders would lie between the covers of these never-to-be-written modules, and in what kind of world would they be situated?

The theme of the solar system has appeared at various stages on the blog (in the early days, here, and later on here, here, here, and here, not to mention most recently here) and still think of it as an untapped imaginary resource - just as planetary romance is itself is a sadly neglected subgenre. Hard SF is one thing, but what I really long for is a version of Spelljammer done right, in which the entire solar system - planets, moons and all - is reimagined as a vast sequence of individualised, but interrelated, campaign settings across which a group of PCs could in theory range at will. Here, the emphasis would not be on realism but on capturing the character of the solar system's contents, as conjured by a cursory knowledge of what each planet or moon looks like, its name, and its symbolism in intellectual history or myth. Somebody with the time ought to try it; I'm too busy with aforementioned job and family, not to mention trawling around the internet for tidbits to sate my idle curiosity.

7 comments:

  1. The use of the anatomical terms dorsum and fossae are very suggestive. Is the fantasy version of Mercury a living planet? Maybe an elder god? Pathfinder did something similar with one of the planets in their campaign world, Golarion. Aucturn I think?

    The Heretic

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    1. The Pathfinder/Starfinder solar system was what came to mind when reading this post; it has pulp-Mercury, pulp-Venus, pulp-Mars, etc.; when it comes to "capturing the character" of the worlds in question (their old pop-culture fantastical characters, I mean), it's not a bad starting point.

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    2. Curiously enough, the terms fossa and dorsum are present not only in anatomy, but in astronomy as well (its tough to describe a wobly spiny bump as anything other than the backside of a god-nows-what. What could a astronomer do, call it a wiggly-thingie?). Wikipedia is not much of a source, but just to show how commonplace this nomenclature is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrinkle_ridge
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossa_(planetary_nomenclature)

      This, of course, does not diminish your extremely cool idea of the planet as a living thing. Quite on the contrary, it appears that even "serious", "dry" academic nomenclature retains something of the otherworldy awe we feel for the night sky - in a way, the celestial bodies never cease to be the gods wandering the big outside in our imaginations. After all, haven't we named them all after heroes, divinities and monsters?

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  2. There was a Bradbury story called "The Creatures that Time Forgot" about people living on Mercury who were descendants of space travelers, but their metabolism had become so rapid that their lives were eight days long, so thousands of generations passed in a matter of decades. (They could telepathically absorb knowledge from their elders, which is how they managed to survive at all.)

    You can probably find it online by looking up the title. It might be under "Fire and Ice". I wrote some rules for an RPG based on it last year, but it's far from completion. Each PC would have 3-4 days worth of adventuring life between childhood and old age, so party members would change quickly.

    (The original story seemed to have a roughly 24-hour Earth day, but a real Mercurial day is 176 Earth days long. That might make for a more manageable time scale if you wanted to stick to the "8-day lifespan" rule without being quite so hurried.)

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    1. Thanks - I probably have it, as I think I have all of Bradbury's short fiction. I'll have to see what collection it's in and dig it out.

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  3. A worthy topic - and I spy your opportunity to serve as Svengali for a series of interlocking publications all under an overarching banner BRIGABRACADABRA or otherwise . . .

    . . . but can't shake out of my head that your post refers to Viriko and its ilk where there may be some fundamental level of internal indexing, when you are dispatched on a quest toward

    [CLASSICAL ELEMENT] [DESCRIPTIVE ADJECTIVE]

    or

    [FORTIFICATION TYPE] [COLOR] [HERALDIC ANIMAL]

    you are in danger of finding at journey's end you were already there in the first place but the appellation shifted somewhere in transit

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