Bio of a Space Tyrant series is a six-book science-fiction series by Piers Anthony based within the Solar System. The series revolves around the character Hope Hubris and his family, and charts Hope's ascent from poor Hispanic refugee to Tyrant of Jupiter, a single person heading the Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches of the government. It is considerably more adult-themed than many of Anthony's earlier works.
The novels are set in a future several hundred years distant at a point where the nations of Earth have expanded into and filled the Solar System. Various planets, moons and asteroids within the Solar System have political, religious and geographical affiliations similar to those on 1980s Earth. Many events in the series parallel modern-day situations; for instance, Mars is controlled by the countries formerly comprising the Middle East, and has the largest supply of iron, the primary fuel in Anthony's universe. Ganymede parallels Cuba, and has a Communist government allied with North Saturn's, which corresponds to the Soviet Union. A "Missile Crisis" is an event in the series; many other such correspondences abound.
The series is presented as Hope's first-person autobiography, and includes his image as a tyrant and womanizer. It is clear from the introductions and epilogues that Hope died before his memoir's publication and that his career as military man, politician, executive and statesman was greatly misunderstood by the public, especially his various affairs with women, a major focus of the series.
Follows Hope and his family's flight from their home on Callisto to Jupiter. Hope's family sets out in a "space bubble" with many other refugees. The group is attacked repeatedly by space pirates, and most of the adults are raped, killed, or kidnapped by the end of the story.
Chronicles Hope's years as a migrant laborer and 15-year career in the Navy, largely under his sister Spirit's guidance. One of the stranger aspects of the Navy is the Tail, a militarily administered bordello all servicemen are required to use.
Hope's marriage is a major focus of the story of his political career as he ascends through Jupiter's political system, culminating in his election as president. One of his chief rivals is Tocsin, a man with some of the characteristics of Richard Nixon. The book begins with Hope held captive on a spaceship while his captors attempt to brainwash him into being a pawn of unknown adversaries; it is implied that Tocsin is involved.
Follows Hope's career as president after his widely popular election and the subsequent constitutional convention establishing him as the eponymous space tyrant. While Jupiter's political system is a more or less exact analogue of the current U.S. system, the constitutional convention is not. On the grounds that a constitutional convention set up the current system of government (three separate branches, Executive, Judicial, and Legislative, with built-in checks and balances), it is proposed that a second convention can dissolve it. The president of the convention then appoints Hope as the single, supreme head of the government.
Covers Hope's waning years in exile after leaving office, especially his advocacy of a new light-speed travel method and attempts to foster unity and peace in the solar system.
Covers the same period as the first five books from the point of view of Hope's sister, Spirit. Fills in many gaps when the two siblings were apart.
Solar geography
Many of the situations in the series are direct parallels to real situations on Earth. For instance, Hope at one point is stationed on Chiron (an analogue of Cyprus) in order to keep the peace between colonists of Greek and Turkish descent; the attempt by Hope's family, Hispanic refugees from a moon of Jupiter that is analogous to Hispaniola, to enter Jupiter resembles problems in the U.S. with immigration, including Hope's inability to find work as anything other than a poorly paid agricultural worker.
The Solar System of Anthony's universe directly parallels the political makeup of modern Earth, as outlined in appendices in the series. Following are the many correspondences:
The Galilean moons, or Galilean satellites, are the four largest moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. They are the most readily visible Solar System objects after Saturn, the dimmest of the classical planets; though their closeness to bright Jupiter makes naked-eye observation very difficult, they are readily seen with common binoculars, even under night sky conditions of high light pollution. The invention of the telescope enabled the discovery of the moons in 1610. Through this, they became the first Solar System objects discovered since humans have started tracking the classical planets, and the first objects to be found to orbit any planet beyond Earth.
Galileo was an American robotic space program that studied the planet Jupiter and its moons, as well as several other Solar System bodies. Named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, the Galileo spacecraft consisted of an orbiter and an atmospheric entry probe. It was delivered into Earth orbit on October 18, 1989, by Space ShuttleAtlantis on the STS-34 mission, and arrived at Jupiter on December 7, 1995, after gravity assist flybys of Venus and Earth, and became the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter. The spacecraft then launched the first probe to directly measure its atmosphere. Despite suffering major antenna problems, Galileo achieved the first asteroid flyby, of 951 Gaspra, and discovered the first asteroid moon, Dactyl, around 243 Ida. In 1994, Galileo observed Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9's collision with Jupiter.
Callisto, or Jupiter IV, is the second-largest moon of Jupiter, after Ganymede. In the Solar System it is the third-largest moon after Ganymede and Saturn's largest moon Titan, and nearly as large as the smallest planet Mercury. Callisto is, with a diameter of 4,821 km, roughly a third larger than Earth's Moon and orbits Jupiter on average at a distance of 1,883,000 km, which is about six times further out than the Moon orbiting Earth. It is the outermost of the four large Galilean moons of Jupiter, which were discovered in 1610 with one of the first telescopes, being visible from Earth with common binoculars.
Ganymede, or Jupiter III, is the largest and most massive natural satellite of Jupiter, and in the Solar System. Despite being the only moon in the Solar System with a substantial magnetic field, it is the largest Solar System object without a substantial atmosphere. Like Saturn's largest moon Titan, it is larger than the planet Mercury, but has somewhat less surface gravity than Mercury, Io, or the Moon due to its lower density compared to the three. Ganymede orbits Jupiter in roughly seven days and is in a 1:2:4 orbital resonance with the moons Europa and Io, respectively.
The Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) was a proposed NASA spacecraft designed to explore the icy moons of Jupiter. The main target was Europa, where an ocean of liquid water may harbor alien life. Ganymede and Callisto, which are now thought to also have liquid, salty oceans beneath their icy surfaces, were also targets of interest for the probe.
There are 95 moons of Jupiter with confirmed orbits as of 5 February 2024. This number does not include a number of meter-sized moonlets thought to be shed from the inner moons, nor hundreds of possible kilometer-sized outer irregular moons that were only briefly captured by telescopes. All together, Jupiter's moons form a satellite system called the Jovian system. The most massive of the moons are the four Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, which were independently discovered in 1610 by Galileo Galilei and Simon Marius and were the first objects found to orbit a body that was neither Earth nor the Sun. Much more recently, beginning in 1892, dozens of far smaller Jovian moons have been detected and have received the names of lovers or daughters of the Roman god Jupiter or his Greek equivalent Zeus. The Galilean moons are by far the largest and most massive objects to orbit Jupiter, with the remaining 91 known moons and the rings together comprising just 0.003% of the total orbiting mass.
Solar eclipses on Jupiter occur when any of the natural satellites of Jupiter pass in front of the Sun as seen from the planet Jupiter.
The magnetosphere of Jupiter is the cavity created in the solar wind by Jupiter's magnetic field. Extending up to seven million kilometers in the Sun's direction and almost to the orbit of Saturn in the opposite direction, Jupiter's magnetosphere is the largest and most powerful of any planetary magnetosphere in the Solar System, and by volume the largest known continuous structure in the Solar System after the heliosphere. Wider and flatter than the Earth's magnetosphere, Jupiter's is stronger by an order of magnitude, while its magnetic moment is roughly 18,000 times larger. The existence of Jupiter's magnetic field was first inferred from observations of radio emissions at the end of the 1950s and was directly observed by the Pioneer 10 spacecraft in 1973.
The exploration of Jupiter has been conducted via close observations by automated spacecraft. It began with the arrival of Pioneer 10 into the Jovian system in 1973, and, as of 2024, has continued with eight further spacecraft missions in the vicinity of Jupiter and two more en route. All but one of these missions were undertaken by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and all but four were flybys taking detailed observations without landing or entering orbit. These probes make Jupiter the most visited of the Solar System's outer planets as all missions to the outer Solar System have used Jupiter flybys. On 5 July 2016, spacecraft Juno arrived and entered the planet's orbit—the second craft ever to do so. Sending a craft to Jupiter is difficult, mostly due to large fuel requirements and the effects of the planet's harsh radiation environment.
Spacehounds of IPC is a science fiction novel by American writer E. E. Smith. It was first published in book form in 1947 by Fantasy Press in an edition of 2,008 copies. It was the first book published by Fantasy Press. The novel was originally serialized in the August, September and October issues of the magazine Amazing Stories in 1931. Smith was disenchanted when he saw editor T. O'Conor Sloane's unauthorized changes in the story, most likely made to give equal length to each of the three parts it had been split into.
A planetary-mass moon is a planetary-mass object that is also a natural satellite. They are large and ellipsoidal in shape. Moons may be in hydrostatic equilibrium due to tidal or radiogenic heating, in some cases forming a subsurface ocean. Two moons in the Solar System, Ganymede and Titan, are larger than the planet Mercury, and a third, Callisto, is just slightly smaller than it, although all three are less massive. Additionally, seven – Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, Io, Earth's Moon, Europa, and Triton – are larger and more massive than the dwarf planets Pluto and Eris.
The Solar System Family Portrait is an image of many of the Solar System's planets and moons acquired by MESSENGER during November 2010 from approximately the orbit of Mercury. The mosaic is intended to be complementary to the Voyager 1's Family Portrait acquired from the outer edge of the Solar System on February 14, 1990.
Laplace-P was a proposed orbiter and lander by the Russian Federal Space Agency designed to study the Jovian moon system and explore Ganymede with a lander.
A palimpsest, in planetary astronomy, is an ancient crater that has been degraded over time. They may also be referred to as "ghost craters", "degraded craters", "buried craters", or "pathological craters". Palimpsests have been identified on Mercury, the Earth, the Moon, Mars, Ganymede, Callisto, and possibly even Titan. On Mars, these features are morphologically described as craters that are "flat-floored, rimless, extremely shallow, without central peaks, and would probably represent what remains after erosion."
The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer is an interplanetary spacecraft on its way to orbit and study three icy moons of Jupiter: Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. These planetary-mass moons are planned to be studied because they are thought to have significant bodies of liquid water beneath their frozen surfaces, which would make them potentially habitable for extraterrestrial life.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Solar System:
Planetary oceanography, also called astro-oceanography or exo-oceanography, is the study of oceans on planets and moons other than Earth. Unlike other planetary sciences like astrobiology, astrochemistry, and planetary geology, it only began after the discovery of underground oceans in Saturn's moon Titan and Jupiter's moon Europa. This field remains speculative until further missions reach the oceans beneath the rock or ice layer of the moons. There are many theories about oceans or even ocean worlds of celestial bodies in the Solar System, from oceans made of liquid carbon with floating diamonds in Neptune to a gigantic ocean of liquid hydrogen that may exist underneath Jupiter's surface.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Jupiter:
Tianwen-4, formerly known as Gan De, is a planned Chinese interplanetary mission to study the Jovian system, possibly sharing a launch with a spacecraft which will make a flyby of Uranus.
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