On the Planet Saro

1935. Meet the ant people! Don and Betty visit the planet Saro.

Isaac Asimov was born in 1920 and he grew up helping in the "candy" shops that were owned by his parents. Of particular interest to the young Isaac were the magazines and comic books that were sold to customers... how could he resist reading them? What did he think about comics such as the one shown to the right on this page?

In 1935, comic books were competing for Isaac's interest along with science fiction magazines such as Amazing. 

Amazing Stories, February 1929

At the age of 17, Isaac began to get serious about writing his own science fiction stories and by 1939 he was a published author.

Asimov's first published story is set in outer space and sadly, it only features human characters. I have to wonder if Isaac, who studied biology, was a bit embarrassed by the fictional aliens that appeared in most stories about life on distant planets. While growing up, Asimov had to convince his skeptical father that it was not a waste of time to read science fiction magazines. 

Apparently Isaac's argument was that since the word "science" was in "science fiction", those Sci Fi magazines were educational. For a time, the young Isaac read and rated every Sci Fi story being published.

Phagocyte Domain

Educational. In the February 1927 Amazing was a story called "Phagocytes" by A. H. Johnson. That story was written from the perspective of a white blood cell. I love science fiction stories with maps (example) depicting the locations that are explored by adventurers who visit strange new places. For "Phagocytes", readers were provided with a map of the battleground where the immune system fought invading bacteria (image to the right). The story is narrated by a well-spoken phagocyte who describes the action during the battle.

In the same issue of Amazing there was "The Death of the Moon" by Alexander Moore Phillips. In that story, readers such as the young Isaac were taken back to the age of the dinosaurs. I recently mentioned a short story by Asimov (Darwinian Pool Room") that dealt with the extinction of dinosaurs. In "The Death of the Moon", Phillips imagined that space-faring lunarians long ago visited Earth, just at the time when the Moon was becoming uninhabitable. The clever lunarian scientists built a spaceship and made plans for a great migration of all the lunarians from the dying Moon to the green Earth.

The dying Moon.

There's the interior art (image to the left) depicting the the lunarian spaceship, ready for the trip to Earth. The lunarians have six limbs, but they walk upright on the two hind-limbs. The lunarians were great tool-users and equipped with finger-like digits at the end of the their fore-limbs. In the color cover illustration (above, left), one of the lunarians is shown using a ray-gun to blast a dinosaur, but all of the members of the expedition from the Moon are killed by Tyrannosaurus Rex. Thus the invasion of the lunarians was halted, and, in time, humans evolved to inherit the Earth.

I despise stories built upon a foundation of a technological breakthrough that is made by one person and never repeated. "The Death of the Moon" is such a story. The great scientist who designs the lunarian spaceship is killed by Mr. T. Rex, putting an end to the lunarian space age after just one flight.

cover by Kenneth Barr

The first Sci Fi story featuring insectoid aliens that I ever tried to read was Serpent's Reach. I'll accept Sci Fi characters wearing Jodhpurs in 1935, but not in 1980. I was unable to finish reading Serpent's Reach and my first insectoid alien story was my last until I had the "pleasure" of reading "The Death of the Moon". That old story by Phillips has the huge advantage of being short, although readers had to suffer through annoyances such as having the stars described by Phillips as being sardonic.

How many sardonic stars are in your star cluster? 🌟 I've been thinking about aliens in the context of Alastor Cluster, one of the literary inventions of Jack Vance. For "Meet the Phari", I've added the four-legged Plesypy to the bipedal Fwai-chi of Marune and the swimming merlings of Trullion.

More ant scientifiction coming soon! (1928)

I'm not sure what accounts for the popularity of insect-like aliens in science fiction. Right after the end of "The Death of the Moon" readers were treated to the editorial blurb that is shown to the left, promising another great story about alien ant-life.

In my opinion, science fiction fans could have gotten along just fine with fewer stories about ant-people, although the ones found on the planet Saro were apparently not dangerous. 😌

Back in the 1970s I tried to watch Fantastic Voyage. That movie was so bad that I don't think I made it to the end. I never read Asimov's novelization, but I must wonder if he ever came up with a plausible mechanism for shrinking people.

In the case of Ant-Man, I like the idea of "explaining" such shrinkage by making use of imaginary particles (see Pym particles). For my own stories that are set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe, there are both the tiny hierions and the even tinier sedrons.

Click image to enlarge.

Anyhow, this blog post is not about fictional ants. I mention them here because ant-like aliens appeared in one of the early Sci Fi comics, providing me with a lead-up to the announcement that I have decided to try making my own comic version of "Meet the Phari". I'm going to be using Daz Studio to make the human and alien-human hybrid characters in my comic version of the story. Apparently, Ant-man figured out how to telepathically communicate with ants by using a "cybernetic helmet". The telepathy depicted in "Meet the Phari" is also technology-assisted telepathy, although the lowly humans of Alastor cluster have no understanding of the physical basis of telepathy. The goal (of Delpha) in "Meet the Phari" is to boost the developing telepathic abilities of humans to the point where they can begin to communicate telepathically with the alien Phari.

Teaching a friend how to hunt synpaz.

 Red, White and Blue. In my stories, I use italicized text to depict telepathic communication between characters. As shown in the image at the end of this blog post (below), back in 1963 the thought captions were given squiggly borders to indicated telepathy. For the image shown above, I adopted that style of caption for showing the thoughts of three "Meet the Phari" characters. Inside Alastor star cluster, a common social occasion is the "starwatch", the one shown is here taking place on a balcony of a tall building of a large city. Two of these characters are telepaths, one from the planet Ottengla and one is a genetically engineered Phyphy who was made in Delpha's genetics laboratory. Poor Artep...

See the comic strip.

Related Reading: Star Trek: New Visions

Next: reflective surfaces in Daz Studio

See also: Chapter 11 of "Meet the Phari".

image source: Tales to Astonish 1963