Science Fiction & Fantasy
by Andrew Liptak
There is no better example of how science fiction’s tendency to try and imagine a plausible future is like throwing a dart at a moving target than Larry Niven’s 1964 short story “The Coldest Place.” Up to that point, astronomers widely believed that the planet Mercury was tidally locked to the Sun: its rotation matched that of its orbit and as a result, only one side ever faced the Sun, meaning that its dark side would have been much cooler. Niven took that bit of knowledge and incorporated it into his story his first and sent it off to Frederik Pohl’s