Real fictional worlds

A while back I had a look at a number of fictional planets in the DC universe whose names contain the most uncommon letters.  As I was reading through the most recent back issue of Mystery in Space which I have picked up it occurred to me that something perhaps even more bizarre than making up a planet with a weird sounding name, is simply to make up a planet and name it after the real star that it orbits.  This of course leads to some inconsistencies right from the start, as the chances of the people from a faraway star calling their star the same as it is on Earth is a bit farfetched, but it does sort of fit in with the concept that there is some sort of universal language that everyone speaks throughout the universe (which most often resembles English.)   While these early science fiction stories also ignored concepts such as the distance between stars, it is still worth noting that they had these really wrong as well.  One of the main reasons that we see what we do from Earth is because we are on one of the further out arms of the galaxy and thus get to look at it sort of from the vantage point of an outsider looking in.  Of course the biggest problem of all with simply arbitrarily assigning a star a planet that can support life, is that it doesn’t give any relevance to the star or the planet itself.  The conditions by which life on Earth arose are pretty precise, and a much larger star or hotter one would have led to no life.  The same if Earth were where Mars is.  Essentially for all of us to be here, a lot of very specific things had to happen to make it viable, and assuming that these conditions exist on other stars is both unlikely and impossible to know.   Once again it is all too much to expect out of a science fiction comic from the 1960s, but interesting nonetheless to see that sometimes making up the name of a planet is better than co-opting a pre-existing one.  

Start the Conversation