Now the interesting thing about Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” suite is that the planets are out of order, and it is not immediately clear why.
When I was a small child I learned the order of the planets, and it went like this: Mercury; Venus; Earth; Mars; Jupiter; Saturn; Uranus; Neptune; Pluto.1 And you learned them in the same order, although if you happened to learn the list of planets after the Robber Council of 2006, you will not have learned the complete list. But that isn’t the order Holst put them in!
Aha, but that’s because Holst was using the medieval/astrological sequence and that had the planets in a different order, right? Wrong! Medieval astronomy, it’s true, did regard the Sun and the Moon as planets2 , but this was their order: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.3 Same order we use, if you strip out the things that, by our definition, aren’t planets. Everyone uses that order; everyone has always used that order. Even Aleister Crowley used that order.
And now here’s the order of “The Planets” according to Holst:
Mars, the Bringer of War
Venus, the Bringer of Peace
Mercury, the Winged Messenger
Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age
Uranus, the Magician
Neptune, the Mystic4
In abandoning the traditional order of the planets, Holst has done something so “a rebours”, so perverse that even Aleister Crowley wasn’t prepared to go there. What could possibly explain this decision?
I propose that Holst chose the arrangement he did in order to tell a story. The Story, one might say: the one that, in various forms and under various guises, was told and retold by the science fiction writers of the first half of the 20th century. And it goes like this:
A terrible war or series of wars brings human civilization to its knees. Mars, the Bringer of War.
At the eleventh hour, humanity comes to its senses, and in a great meeting of minds forever renounces war and embraces harmony and mutual love. Venus, the Bringer of Peace.
In place of war, humanity embraces free communication, free commerce, transportation to knit all parts of the world together. Mercury, the Winged Messenger.
…which leads to an economic boom, general prosperity and happiness for all mankind. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
Prosperity leads to increased health and medical advances; life expectancy soars.5 Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age
Pursuit of science and technology by a prosperous and long- lived human race leads to marvels that previous ages would have thought of as supernatural. Uranus, the Magician
That’s the plot of most of H G Wells’ more optimistic novels right there: “Men Like Gods”, “A Modern Utopia”, “The World Set Free”, “The War in the Air”6, “The Shape of Things to Come”.7 But Holst, that visionary, goes one better than Wells and adds one final step, one that wouldn’t become part of the written Story until Olaf Stapledon, decades later:
Its material needs forever taken care of, humanity embraces its ultimate destiny of spiritual fulfilment and union with the Absolute. Neptune, the Mystic
Clearly, it is high time that Holst is restored to his rightful place as one of the great pioneers of speculative fiction. And there will be one great benefit to the fan community, as well: the next time some pompous snob makes the tired observation that “of course, science fiction isn’t literature”, the truefan will be able to look the credentialed killjoy right in the eye and retort “No: it’s music.”
It’s totes a planet.
You can’t fault their logic. “Planets” were lights in the sky that move around relative to the stars (which was the literal definition of “planet” in ancient Greek) and the Sun and the Moon were certainly lights in the sky that moved around relative to the stars. They were kind of big compared to, say, Mercury, but medieval astronomers weren’t down with fat-shaming.
They didn’t have telescopes, so they didn’t know about the other three.
No Pluto, because that particular planet had not yet been discovered.
I promise I will stop going on about Pluto now. But it’s totes a planet, and the Robber Council of 2006 be damned!
Or as H G Wells put it in “The Shape of Things to Come”: “The Average Man Grows Older and Wiser”.
Whose narrative does stop at step one, Mars, but it’s implied that there’s a good time coming and the other steps will be reached.
Granted, this novel does feature the death of about 50% of the human race in a global pandemic between steps 1 & 2, so to describe it as “optimistic” may be laying a heavier burden on that modifier than it may reasonably be expected to bear.