Was Vulcan originally meant to be in Sol system?

[Christopher]

I've just had an interesting thought. I was reading a post on Tor.com about Back to the Future, and the author proposed the idea that George McFly may have coined the name "Vulcan" for Star Trek after hearing it from Marty. I pointed out that the idea of a planet named Vulcan was already familiar in science and SF since it was proposed in the 1850s by Urbain Le Verrier as a hypothetical planet within Mercury’s orbit (to explain orbital anomalies that were later explained by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity). As I said in that thread, there were a number of science fiction stories set on that hypothetical planet Vulcan from the ’30s to the ’60s, if not earlier. So it was already a common name for an alien planet in the cultural zeitgeist by the time Star Trek came along, which is no doubt why ST used the name.

But then it occurred to me to wonder: When Spock was first identified as being from Vulcan, did the writers intend it to be an extrasolar planet that happened to have the same name as the debunked solar planet, or did they initially intend it to be the cis-Mercurian planet that Le Verrier proposed? When was it first established that Vulcan was not in the Sol system?

Spock was first identified as "part-Vulcanian" in "Mudd's Women," and his planet was first referred to as Vulcan in "The Man Trap." "Operation -- Annihilate!" mentions "the brightness of the Vulcan sun," but that could possibly be read as a reference to the brightness of Sol as seen from a planet closer than Mercury. "Amok Time" is probably the first time it’s clear that Vulcan is in its own star system (since there’s dialogue about setting course for Vulcan, not Sol system, during an interstellar journey), but earlier, "Tomorrow is Yesterday" at least implied that Mercury was the closest planet to the Sun.

So it’s possible that when Spock was first mentioned as being from Vulcan, it was meant to be Le Verrier’s Vulcan, a super-hot inner planet of our system. After all, the initial series prospectus described Spock as "possibly half-Martian," so maybe Roddenberry (or Stephen Kandel?) just swapped one solar planet for another. And perhaps they changed it to an extrasolar planet because Kellam De Forest or their science advisors pointed out that Le Verrier's Vulcan had been disproven in 1915. (Note that when James Blish novelized "Tomorrow is Yesterday" in 1968, he added dialogue explaining that Vulcan was not the hypothetical solar planet, but a planet of 40 Eridani. Suggesting that Blish expected his readers to be familiar with the name Vulcan in its historic context and would need such a clarification.)

What I'm wondering is if there's any way to prove this. So this is directed at Harvey and anyone else with access to early documentation about TOS. Is there any indication that Roddenberry, or whoever decided Spock was from Vulcan, was originally assuming it was the hypothetical planet closest to the Sun, rather than an extrasolar world as later established? Because I can't find any evidence earlier than "Tomorrow is Yesterday" that would rule out the former possibility.

 

[Drone]

I'm really not familiar with the arcana that might hold some further hints as to the early creative thoughts in this regard, but if that was the intention, wouldn't it occur to the writers that viewers, while intuiting that Trek isn't meant to be a precise rendering of their own actual future, might be rather questioning, if not negatively critical, of the idea that mankind hadn't seen any evidence of life on such a supposedly relatively close body, even at the then primitive stage of extraplanetary exploration?

It would just seem to run counter to the idea that Trek represented something different in the genre on tv, by trying to present possibilities from a rather more serious scientific perspective by, in a way, harkening the viewers back to a time that, let's say, it was popularly accepted that there were canals on Mars.

 

[GSchnitzer]

In James Blish's novelization of "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," Captain Christopher asks if the Enterprise could get to Vulcan in seconds==since it's just inside the orbit of Mercury. Spock corrects him that Vulcan is not in the Earth's solar system.

Blish would write his stories from earlier drafts of Trek scripts. He would also concoct stuff from his own imagination. If no documentation can be found to settle the "where ws Vulcan intended to be" question, and if it turns out that this "Vulcan is not in Earth's solar system" is indeed in an early draft of "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," then this might constitute the earliest "stake in the ground."

 

[ZapBrannigan]

But then it occurred to me to wonder: When Spock was first identified as being from Vulcan, did the writers intend it to be an extrasolar planet that happened to have the same name as the debunked solar planet, or did they initially intend it to be the cis-Mercurian planet that Le Verrier proposed?

I've had the same thought, that the earliest, "primordial" Spock conceptualizations might have been sketched in that fun state of scientific ignorance, a kind of naivete, that makes the really vintage sci-fi shine. Like when Superman's planet Krypton explodes, rocks from there fall to the Earth, because other planets are all just "up there" in the sky, and loose things fall down.

But I'm sure Roddenberry knew there were only nine planets to our sun, and Vulcan wasn't one of them. Did he initially mean to knowingly "add" Vulcan as a fictional tenth planet? That's a question. I doubt it, but it's possible.

If it were Irwin Allen, I could imagine almost any fun science error. On Lost in Space, a comet radiates intense heat like a tiny sun, and the word "galaxy" is sometimes used to mean a single solar system. In Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961), the Earth's Van Allen radiation belt catches fire and has to be extinguished by blasting it with a nuclear missile. Anything goes.

Star Trek went just as far afield as any Irwin Allen show, if not farther, in terms of impossible situations, but nearly always used a more respectable vocabulary to create an air of plausibility.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

If they were originally playing to put Vulcan in the Sol system wouldn't it have made more sense just to stick with the original idea that Spock's people were Martians?

 

[Melakon]

In his original series pitch, doesn't Roddenberry describe Spock as "probably a Martian"?

 

[Harvey]

I thinks he idea that Spock's home planet is in another star system is implicit from almost the beginning, but in terms of explicitly stating that? I'm stumped.

For reference, here's some of Roddenberry's early comments on the character's home planet (May 2, 1966):

We do know a few things about Mister Spock’s planet and will develop others as the series continues. For example, the somewhat larger and more cupped ears come from the physical fact that the atmosphere on his home planet is somewhat thinner than on Earth -- lighter sound waves and thus more hearing sensitivity required. Because of this, all his sensory organs are slightly better developed than ours. And since his home planet is also dryer and hotter than Earth, Spock can withstand greater temperatures, go longer without water.

Playing in contrast to his satanic physiognomy, Mister Spock is a devout vegetarian. The idea of eating animal carcasses, cooked or not, is revolting to him. Even his vegetable diet is restricted, limited to the simplest of vegetable life forms.

Hypnotism is an everyday tool on Spock’s home planet, deriving from the intellectual intensity of the culture there. It forms a part of their economic, social, and sex life. He has this capacity -- and when we play it, we stay accurate, never get into hypnotism fantasy. But he uses this ability rarely since this is one of the many compromises Spock has had to make in the past in order to rise to his present position and live with humans.

More about Spock’s home planet -- the background of the culture there is stoic, possibly something akin to the direction which was being taken at one time by our own Greek civilization. But over the centuries Spock’s planet developed it even further -- repressing emotion further and further until emotion became a thing evil, even sordid, and finally reaching the point where no one would admit to emotion and indeed even took great pride in the fact that they had no feelings at all. This probably led to a need for hypnosis as a part of the sex act, and we may gather from time to time that love on Spock’s planet has a somewhat more violent quality than Earth’s aesthetics permit mankind to enjoy. (Unless NBC changes its policies somewhat, we probably will not do a script directly dealing with this subject.)

However, the above does bear on our series since even Spock’s “hypnotic” look strongly affects Earth females and he goes to great pains to avoid too much contact with them. There is a back-story to this -- many years ago when Mister Spock first joined the service, he was careless on this score, perhaps even enjoyed this strange ability over Earth women. But it quickly created both personal and professional troubles. His own “love” action and reaction goes beyond what men would accept and the effects on Earth females lasted far too long for comfort. Thus celibacy became one of the many compromises he would have to make to stay in service.

Mister Spock’s mixed blood led to his science and starship career. On his home planet he was half-Earthman, on Earth he was half-alien -- uncomfortable in either place. While Spock’s planet and Earth generally respect each other, the strong emotional differences limited closeness and intermixing. Science was a legitimate occupational choice, Science Officer on a vessel even better. He could make some sort of life for himself in the artificial society of a semi-military organization.

 

[Harvey]

In his original series pitch, doesn't Roddenberry describe Spock as "probably a Martian"?

"Probably half-Martian, he has a slightly reddish complexion and semi-pointed ears."

 

[Timo]

...Perhaps Spock came via a volcano from the world inside Earth, even?

It's intriguing that there doesn't seem to exist enough documentation to nail down this issue. It's easy to imagine how the name Vulcan came to be, though: with Mars abandoned, a fictional name would be needed, and one that didn't sound silly like Xooxobul, derivative like Mingo, or "already taken" like Arcturus.

So a name with a résumé that reads "In early 20th century, served in astronomy. Never was a star. Currently unemployed." would stand a pretty good chance! I.e. the old role as a Sol world would be a factor of sorts in the process, giving credibility to the name even when used wholly out of original context.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Cyrano Mudd]

I doubt it...

Lacking any real evidence to the contrary I think it is safe to assume that the planet Vulcan was conceived to be a planet outside of our system. If the opposite had been the intent, the fact probably would have been explicitly stated in reference to Vulcan being Sol I. Further, the “scientific due diligence” that went into the show would have revealed that life on any body orbiting that closely to a yellow dwarf star would be incapable of producing or even sustaining life – at least the likes of Vulcans as we know them.

Star Trek may have bent scientific facts to suit its needs, but I doubt they’d try to “slip one by” so egregiously when any grade-schooler of the time could call them on it. Conceptually, it just lacks credibility.

 

[Silvercrest]

In James Blish's novelization of "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," Captain Christopher asks if the Enterprise could get to Vulcan in seconds==since it's just inside the orbit of Mercury. Spock corrects him that Vulcan is not in the Earth's solar system.

Blish would write his stories from earlier drafts of Trek scripts. He would also concoct stuff from his own imagination. If no documentation can be found to settle the "where ws Vulcan intended to be" question, and if it turns out that this "Vulcan is not in Earth's solar system" is indeed in an early draft of "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," then this might constitute the earliest "stake in the ground."

I'd need to go pull out my copy of Star Trek I from 1967 (originally titled just "Star Trek"). However, I am pretty sure it makes a reference to Spock being from "a nonsolar planet confusingly called Vulcan."

 

[Christopher]

I'm really not familiar with the arcana that might hold some further hints as to the early creative thoughts in this regard, but if that was the intention, wouldn't it occur to the writers that viewers, while intuiting that Trek isn't meant to be a precise rendering of their own actual future, might be rather questioning, if not negatively critical, of the idea that mankind hadn't seen any evidence of life on such a supposedly relatively close body, even at the then primitive stage of extraplanetary exploration?

At the time, we were only a couple of years past getting the first photos of the Martian surface from Mariner 4. We didn't yet have the ability to rule out life on other solar planets, not in 1966. It was starting to look unlikely by that point, but a great deal of science fiction of the day still presumed there was life on Mars or Venus, or even on the surfaces of the gas giants, which were still believed to have solid surfaces at the time. My Favorite Martian ended just months before TOS premiered. Even hard-SF writer Larry Niven was writing about alien life on Mars in the mid-'60s.

And the reason it was even possible for Le Verrier to speculate about an unseen planet Vulcan is because the glare of the Sun was so bright that it would've obscured such a planet from view if it had existed. Even today, it's an unresolved question whether there are "vulcanoid" asteroids located inside Mercury's orbit, because we just couldn't see them through the glare.

Blish would write his stories from earlier drafts of Trek scripts. He would also concoct stuff from his own imagination. If no documentation can be found to settle the "where ws Vulcan intended to be" question, and if it turns out that this "Vulcan is not in Earth's solar system" is indeed in an early draft of "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," then this might constitute the earliest "stake in the ground."

But Blish also added a lot of his own material, as you say. And it wasn't just from his own imagination; he sometimes added content that clarified scientific points, like when he provided a more detailed justification for the "water virus" in "The Naked Time." Back then, novelizers were freer to change and add to the tests they adapted. Isaac Asimov heavily rewrote Fantastic Voyage in his novelization to make it more plausible. Vonda McIntyre incorporated some scientific improvements into her novelizations of the Star Trek movies, such as replacing "Ceti Alpha" from TWOK with the correct form "Alpha Ceti," and inventing a particle-physics explanation for how the Genesis Device worked. Blish was the kind of author who would've worked the same way. I'm sure his clarifications about Vulcan were his own additions based on his familiarity with Le Verrier's hypothesis.

Lacking any real evidence to the contrary I think it is safe to assume that the planet Vulcan was conceived to be a planet outside of our system. If the opposite had been the intent, the fact probably would have been explicitly stated in reference to Vulcan being Sol I. Further, the “scientific due diligence” that went into the show would have revealed that life on any body orbiting that closely to a yellow dwarf star would be incapable of producing or even sustaining life – at least the likes of Vulcans as we know them.

Yes, but that diligence came from the advisors and researchers that Roddenberry consulted. Often the writers would come up with one idea, and then the research people would point out its scientific flaws and suggest a better idea.

So that's what I'm thinking here. Given that the idea of a cis-Mercurian planet Vulcan was already around in the science-fictional zeitgeist of the era, it's hard to believe Roddenberry didn't have it in mind when he chose the name. And it seems a reasonable possibility that he initially intended it to be Le Verrier's Vulcan, but was then told by his advisors that it had been disproven half a century earlier, and so he changed it to an extrasolar planet.

Star Trek may have bent scientific facts to suit its needs, but I doubt they’d try to “slip one by” so egregiously when any grade-schooler of the time could call them on it. Conceptually, it just lacks credibility.

Except that, as I said, SF stories continued to use the cis-Mercurian Vulcan into the 1960s, even though it had already been disproven. The Wikipedia article I linked to above gives a few examples, and I'm sure it's far from an exhaustive list. Unfortunately it's hard to search for other examples, because references to Star Trek's Vulcan totally swamp the search engines.

 

[Ronald Held]

Interesting thought, Christopher. I had thought that Spock needed to be from an extra Solar system, to reenforce his alienness. Calling him half Martian may be due to the initial reddish makeup?

 

[Triskelion]

All the while reading GR's notes on Spock I kept hearing echoes of Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land - the human-alien hybrid as a device for social criticism. The Mars references, of course - but also the hypnotism, the sexuality, the ostracism, and the extreme contrast in emotionalism with Valentine Michael Smith. Stranger had plucked social nerves in the sixties, and I wonder if GR was trying to sound a similar chord?

Vulcans have violent sex, who knew.... TV wouldn't be ready for that cultural trait until the redesigned Klingons introduced it. (When would that be - TNG's Emissary? Ironically, the role K'Ehleyr was originally to go to Vulcan actor Robin Curtis - Saavik in STIII: TSFS). Yes, by TNG times had changed, but I ponder why it still feels socially unacceptable for fictional, alien Vulcans to exhibit violence - not only when competing for a mate, but during copulation? But with Klingons, it's de rigueur?

Personally, I would have been very interested to see Vulcans espousing hypnotism instead of telepathy. Hypnotism is fascinating.

 

[mb22]

Wasn't the planet referred to as "Vulcanis" in early publicity?

 

[GSchnitzer]

In James Blish's novelization of "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," Captain Christopher asks if the Enterprise could get to Vulcan in seconds==since it's just inside the orbit of Mercury. Spock corrects him that Vulcan is not in the Earth's solar system.

Blish would write his stories from earlier drafts of Trek scripts. He would also concoct stuff from his own imagination. If no documentation can be found to settle the "where ws Vulcan intended to be" question, and if it turns out that this "Vulcan is not in Earth's solar system" is indeed in an early draft of "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," then this might constitute the earliest "stake in the ground."

I'd need to go pull out my copy of Star Trek I from 1967 (originally titled just "Star Trek"). However, I am pretty sure it makes a reference to Spock being from "a nonsolar planet confusingly called Vulcan."

It does say that. What we need is for someone to pull out an earlier draft of the "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" script to find out of that comment was scripted--or if it was instead cooked up in Blish's fertile imagination.

 

[A beaker full of death]

In his original series pitch, doesn't Roddenberry describe Spock as "probably a Martian"?

"Probably half-Martian, he has a slightly reddish complexion and semi-pointed ears."

I think this drives home the idea that Roddenberry didn't really care. He was interested in story and character. He wanted to get the science right (along with the other details like protocol), but that was not his animating motivation. Science was something to be checked later by consultation with experts. So in terms of conception, I don't think he gave any thought at all to where Vulcan was. His idea was that Spock was satanic - if not from the red planet nearest our own, then from some place named for the god of fire.

 

[Christopher]

What we need is for someone to pull out an earlier draft of the "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" script to find out of that comment was scripted--or if it was instead cooked up in Blish's fertile imagination.

I have no doubt it came from Blish. It sounds like something that an adapter would put in to explain away a scientific anomaly in a script, rather than something a screenwriter would put in the script in the first place. I daresay the hypothetical Vulcan was better-known to science fiction readers than to general television viewers, since SF readers tend to be more science-literate. So Blish's audience was more likely to be familiar with Le Verrier's hypothesis and to need the clarification. The general TV audience would've been less likely to know the difference, so there would've been no point in including such a clarification in the script.

 

[Kor]

Like when Superman's planet Krypton explodes, rocks from there fall to the Earth, because other planets are all just "up there" in the sky, and loose things fall down.

Wasn't there a concept at some point that Krypton was orbiting our sun on the opposite side from Earth? Or am I getting this mixed up with something else?

Kor

 

[Nebusj]

I daresay the hypothetical Vulcan was better-known to science fiction readers than to general television viewers, since SF readers tend to be more science-literate. So Blish's audience was more likely to be familiar with Le Verrier's hypothesis and to need the clarification. The general TV audience would've been less likely to know the difference, so there would've been no point in including such a clarification in the script.

I'm willing to grant that the hypothetical Vulcan would be a little more likely familiar to science fiction readers than to the general public, but still, not that likely. General relativity had gotten quite well-proved a generation earlier and obliterated any need for the hypothetical planet. There hadn't been any observations of anything that might even be the planet since the 19th century. The heyday of even looking was eighty years before. I'm not even aware of a good pop history of it before Asimov's compelling essay ``The Planet That Wasn't'', but that dates to 1975 and so is irrelevant to this discussion.

Science fiction fans might have heard of it, certainly. Patrick Moore's 1961 text Astronomy mentions the hypothesis and disposes of it, in the course of one page on the way to the discovery of Pluto. But that's about the same way --- and on about the same timescale --- that a modern science fiction fan would pick up the trivia that humans used to be believed to have 48 chromosomes per cell when in fact they have 46. Though come to think of it, that chromosome fact did screw up one of Blish's best novels (Titan's Daughter), so maybe he was more sensitive to this sort of thing than most.

The question does make me realize, though, that I can't think of any science fiction stories set on the hypothetical intra-Mercurial Vulcan. Planets more distant than Pluto, sure; the current Flash Gordon Vintage running at Comics Kingdom.com (from 1960) just had a couple baddies transported by psi-power to Ultimo, outermost planet of the solar system. And goodness knows I only know a tiny slice of old science fiction. But there were plenty of authors who went about every peopled planet and its daffy ecosystem and civilization, on planets and asteroids. I'm going to have to look now for anyone who wrote on hypothetical Vulcan.