Fun in the sun
April 15, 2020 2:04 PM   Subscribe

What is the most realistic fictional portrayal of a manned mission to Mercury’s surface? Unlikely bad things can happen in the story so long as the actual mission details and landing are plausible. Any medium is fine.
posted by michaelh to Science & Nature (7 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
"Runaround" by Isaac Asimov. Can't say if it's "the most" realistic.
posted by JimN2TAW at 2:13 PM on April 15, 2020 [2 favorites]


The closest thing I can think of, besides Runaround, one of the I, Robot short stories, is Arthur C. Clarke's "Summertime on Icarus," which is set on the surface not of Mercury, but of Icarus, an Earth-crossing asteroid. In it, an astronaut gets caught outside while the asteroid approaches its perihelion.
posted by Sunburnt at 2:35 PM on April 15, 2020


2312 (which is on that list) is about a colony that lives on Mercury and deals with the extreme temperatures in some pretty interesting ways. It's a very readable book, highly recommended.
posted by jessamyn at 3:25 PM on April 15, 2020 [4 favorites]


In David Brin's Sundiver, explorations of the sun's corona are based out of Mercury. But it has a pre-existing base, it isn't about a landing mission.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 4:58 PM on April 15, 2020


It’s not a crewed mission, but an interesting point of reference would be NASA’s 2010 Mercury Lander Mission Concept Study, which would hypothetically be launching this month.
posted by zamboni at 5:35 PM on April 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: All good answers so far. It seems like the total list of media is short, and I have the indoors time, so I’ll probably just read everything—or reread in the case of Asimov since I remember the robotics puzzle but not the setting.
posted by michaelh at 6:57 AM on April 16, 2020


My favorite scifi account of living on Mercury, by far, is in Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312. It imagines an entire city (Terminator) that slowly circles the planet, perpetually pushed forward by the thermal expansion of the tracks in runs on as they are heated by the sun.

This is not a mission to Mercury story as it begins with an established colony on the planet, but the complexity of the extreme environment is very well explored. I think this is broadly true of Robinson's work - he will propose a few technological advances (strong AI, new materials, etc), but the fundamentals of chem/phys/biol all remain in place.
posted by profanon at 8:26 PM on June 10, 2020 [2 favorites]


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