Worlds Beyond Ours [Amazon Affiliate Link] is a book I have from my parents. It is copyright 1968, so I am only a few years older than this book. It mentions the Apollo program and if all goes well, man will set foot on the moon in a decade.
It is interesting to see color photographs of stars and planets in the age before the Hubble Telescope.
It talks about man looking to the stars and planets and the development of telescopes and rockets and has some maps of planets.
We can get much better pictures and maps from NASA online now. I didn’t have regular internet access until I was a few years past 30. Before then, one either had a set of encyclopedias to refer to at home, or you made a trip to the library.
I was blessed to have a 1969 set of Encyclopedia Britannica in my home growing up. My siblings and I would pulls out a volume and read about a topic and any related topics that caught our interest, much like surfing from article to article on Wikipedia, or I suppose the online Encyclopedia Britannica.
Seeing this old Worlds Beyond Ours emphases just how much the world has changed. Especially one that was published so close to Apollo 11 landing on the moon. Such old books I find fascinating.
If you want a science fiction based game, these things can be interesting. The number of planets and the number of moons around those planets has changed drastically in my lifetime. The true number did not change, we just discovered it.
I recall the Viking Landers on Mars in 1976, Voyager I and II making their way past Mars to Jupiter, then Saturn, and now on the far edges of the solar system. Is it still debated if one of the Voyagers has left the solar system yet?
I am old enough to remember the last Apollo missions to the moon. What I recall most is how SLOW the Atlas rocket ascended. It was quite the shock when the first space shuttle launched and it was so FAST! The movie Apollo 13 was NOT realistic with how fast those rockets actually left the launchpad. I remember my parents and siblings and I all having the same reaction to just how quickly the space shuttle leapt off the pad.
Old books like this can be found at garage sales and used book stores. Like many DMs and players, we tend to collect odd bits of information in the form of books and other things that serve as a basis for our own worlds and games.
I ran some of the science fiction games that my high school group played, mostly Metamorphosis Alpha or Gamma World, but we were predominately a AD&D group. I still love science fiction as well as fantasy.
My recent forays into reading the original Metamorphosis Alpha from DriveThruRPG has me digging out my old books. I wish I still had all of my science fiction collection of paperbacks. Moving from a house to a small apartment years ago forced me to get rid of so much. I can’t easily re-build it, but I have the memories of what I read and the books I want to read again, I can track down.
Perhaps I’ll run another science fiction related game or campaign. At least enough to scratch the itch….
