Mercury in fiction

[2][7] The first English-language work of fiction set primarily on Mercury was William Wallace Cook's 1905 novel Adrift in the Unknown, or Adventures in a Queer Realm, a satire on United States capitalism.

[1][3][4] Examples include Ray Cummings' 1930 novel Tama of the Light Country where the inhabitants of Mercury live their lives under an unmoving Sun,[2] Clark Ashton Smith's 1932 short story "The Immortals of Mercury" where there are two different hostile species on the planet,[1][3][9] Isaac Asimov's 1942 short story "Runaround" (later included in the 1950 fix-up novel I, Robot) where a robot is sent to retrieve critical supplies from the inhospitable dayside and malfunctions,[1][4] Hal Clement's 1953 novel Iceworld where aliens accustomed to much higher temperatures than those found on Earth set up camp on the hot dayside of Mercury,[10] Asimov's 1956 short story "The Dying Night" where a character who has spent a long time on Mercury is used to there being areas in permanent darkness,[4] Alan E. Nourse's 1956 short story "Brightside Crossing" which depicts an attempt to cross the illuminated side of the planet "because it's there" as a feat similar to the then-recent first successful ascent of Mount Everest in 1953,[1][3] Poul Anderson's 1957 short story "Life Cycle" where there is a species that changes from female to male when it goes from the nightside to the dayside and vice versa,[4] Kurt Vonnegut's 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan where there are lifeforms in caves on the nightside that live off of vibrations,[2][3][11] and Eli Sagi [he]'s 1963 novel Harpatkotav Shel Captain Yuno Al Ha'kochav Ha'mistori (English title: The Adventures of Captain Yuno on the Mysterious Planet) where the inhabitants of the respective hemispheres are at war.

[1][3][4][13] A clement twilight zone on a synchronously rotating Mercury, a swamp-and-jungle Venus, and a canal-infested Mars, while all classic science-fiction devices, are all, in fact, based upon earlier misapprehensions by planetary scientists.

Even after it was discovered that Mercury is not tidally locked with the Sun, some stories continued to use the juxtaposition of the hot daytime side facing the Sun and the cold nighttime side facing away as a plot device; the 1982 short story "The Tortoise and O'Hare" by Grant Callin portrays an astronaut who struggles to stay on the night side of the terminator line in order to avoid dying from the heat of the dayside,[4] and both the 1985 novel The Memory of Whiteness by Kim Stanley Robinson and the 2008 novel Saturn's Children by Charles Stross depict cities that move to stay in the sunrise area where it is neither too hot nor too cold.

[11] It is occasionally mined for minerals, as in the 1992 video game Star Control II and the 1994 short story "Cilia-of-Gold" by Stephen Baxter which also features life below the ice in a permanently shadowed region near one of the planet's poles.

[1][4] A terraformed Mercury enclosed in an enormous man-made structure is depicted in the 2000 short story "Romance in Extended Time" by Tom Purdom.

Refer to caption
"Lava Falls on Mercury", cover of If magazine , June 1954
After one orbit, Mercury has rotated 1.5 times, so after two complete orbits the same hemisphere is again illuminated.
Actual 3:2 spin-orbit resonance of Mercury
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