Gravitics

2015

Back in 2015, I mentioned the Jack Vance short story "I'll Build Your Dream Castle" which was published in the September 1947 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. For this story, Vance imagined a type of super-dense matter that could be blasted out of a white dwarf star and found floating through outer space as asteroids in the Solar System.

"I'll Build Your Dream Castle" is set in the future, in a time when spaceships powered by atomic energy are in routine use. Vance worked as a house builder for a time and apparently took a strong dislike to at least one of the house builders who employed him. The protagonist of the the story is a young man, Ernest Farrero, who is full of new ideas for how to satisfy wealthy customers seeking to build their "dream castles".

interior art by William Timmins

Sadly, the illustrations provided for "I'll Build Your Dream Castle" in 1947 were rather drab. Modern readers will prefer the cover art for the 2015 book Dream Castles.

atomic spaceship

In addition to atomic spaceships, Vance deploys other future goodies such as hyproberyl metal and the synthetic fabric Caltonite. To quickly build a castle, lay out the pattern in hyproberyl tubing with a cover of Caltonite then blow on the concrete. With such techniques, Farrero can cut the costs of construction.

Is Farrero's boss happy? No, this is a capitalistic future in which Douane Angker, of the "Structors" Marlais and Angker, does not want his profits trimmed by lowering the cost of building projects. So Farrero is fired and has to go into business for himself. Sadly, it is not easy to get a builder's license on Earth of the future. No problem! Farrero builds in outer space.

in the Ekcolir Reality

As the story was constructed by Vance, the secret to Farrero's success is degenerate matter. Vance included high-density materials in many of his science fiction stories. There is no doubt that supper-dense matter exists inside stars, so why not use asteroids composed of a core of degenerate matter collected from the asteroid belt to create private planets for the wealthy? Farrero goes into the business of building "dream castles" for billionaires on these miniature private worlds in Earth orbit. Sadly, the whole scheme falls apart due to a small detail that Vance ignored: such degenerate matter would not be stable outside of the high gravity field of a star.

Farrero's office assistant, Flora.
Watch for an analogue of Flora
in "The Synpaz of Seelie".

Constructing a mini-planet that is habitable also requires water. Vance's source of water is the lunar crater Hipparchus. This is another technical pitfall for Vance's construction scheme. We now know that there is some water on the Moon, but not giant "ice flows" that can be mined in the fashion imagined by Vance in 1947.

2020
Seventy three years later, it is fairly easy to move past the techno-scientific defects in "I'll Build Your Dream Castle". Vance needed a source of gravity for his mini-planets and he did not just do a hand wave and say "artificial gravity". By having a naturally occurring source of high-density degenerate matter in the Solar System, Farrero was able to lay claim to all 1122 asteroids that could be used to construct mini-planets, giving him a monopoly on the process (which he rubs in the noses of his former bosses, Marlais and Angker).

cover art by Henry Van Dongen

This blog post is part of my August 2020 celebration of the science fiction stories of Jack Vance. This month, I've been writing a series of stories that are set in the Ekcolir Reality. In that Reality, some of the secrets of hierion physics were introduced to the scientific community of Earth. In particular, I need a fictional science method to endow my sy'Paz with the power of flight. The sy'Paz are small humanoids, about one tenth human size, but they do not have wings.

Mary and Artep in Seelie

In his novel, The Languages of Pao, Vance made use of "anti-gravity mesh" as a future technology that allowed humans to fly through the air.

For my new science fantasy story "The Synpaz of Seelie", I imagine a type of hierion that has negative mass. By mixing those special hierions (which are very tiny) into the bodies of the sy'Paz, they can defy gravity. I still do not know what allows the sy'Paz to fly around at high speed. Since this is science fantasy, I'm not really trying very hard to invent fictional science that can explain that. 

Related Reading: August 2019 Vance

Next: "The Synpaz of Seelie"

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