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desperanceOn what today would have been Bradbury’s 92nd birthday, said Michael Meyer, NASA’s lead scientists for the Mars Exploration Program, “In his honor, we declared the place that Curiosity touched down to be forever known as Bradbury Landing.”
Naming things on Mars: I get to do this too. A lot. I have a contemporary map printed off the internet, and a rather lovely wallchart-sized map that dates back to the early seventies and Mariner 9 (the first human spacecraft to orbit another planet, yay!), thereby just predating the naming of Cassini Crater (1973). Which is relevant to my interests, because I am writing a short story largely as a way to anchor some of my ideas about Steampunk!Mars, and I have called it "The Burial of Sir John Mawe at Cassini" for reasons that are both internal to the story and obvious to the well-read audience, and I want to keep that Cassini/Corunna echo. So it is quite clear to me that in alternate Steampunk!Mars, they too will have a lot of places to give names to, and there will be the Imperial faction who will name places Victoria and New South Shields and so forth, and there will be the ethnographic faction who will want to call things by their native Martian names and will be utterly defeated for reasons of [spoiler], and there will be the scientific faction who, yes, want to credit their forebears whether they were British or not. Hence, there can be a crater-city called Cassini, and there can be another overlap between Steampunk!Mars and cold actual Mars, and we will not worry ourselves about being anachronistic because it's not. Two minds with but a single thought, separated only by time, interplanetary distance and actuality: it's entirely reasonable.
Naming things on Mars: I get to do this too. A lot. I have a contemporary map printed off the internet, and a rather lovely wallchart-sized map that dates back to the early seventies and Mariner 9 (the first human spacecraft to orbit another planet, yay!), thereby just predating the naming of Cassini Crater (1973). Which is relevant to my interests, because I am writing a short story largely as a way to anchor some of my ideas about Steampunk!Mars, and I have called it "The Burial of Sir John Mawe at Cassini" for reasons that are both internal to the story and obvious to the well-read audience, and I want to keep that Cassini/Corunna echo. So it is quite clear to me that in alternate Steampunk!Mars, they too will have a lot of places to give names to, and there will be the Imperial faction who will name places Victoria and New South Shields and so forth, and there will be the ethnographic faction who will want to call things by their native Martian names and will be utterly defeated for reasons of [spoiler], and there will be the scientific faction who, yes, want to credit their forebears whether they were British or not. Hence, there can be a crater-city called Cassini, and there can be another overlap between Steampunk!Mars and cold actual Mars, and we will not worry ourselves about being anachronistic because it's not. Two minds with but a single thought, separated only by time, interplanetary distance and actuality: it's entirely reasonable.