With the Green Lantern movie in theaters, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at science fiction’s influence on the history of character.
Back in the eighties, two worlds collided. Green Lantern was a superhero whose comic was based more on the adventure pulps than science fiction. Larry Niven was an award winning hard science fiction author. DC (the publisher of Green Lantern) approached Niven and asked him to write a new “bible” for the series. The editors wanted Niven to flesh out the history of the character.
The Guardians of the Universe created the Green Lantern Corps to be their police force. A renegade Guardian, named Krona, traveled to the beginning of time and witnessed the creation of the universe. His actions introduced evil. When Niven wrote the “Green Lantern Bible” he revealed that was not the case. Krona’s actions caused a link between the beginning and end of time. It caused entropy, not evil, to enter our universe.
Niven also explained how the Guardians were originally from the planet Maltus. Due to their experiments, they ruined the environment and caused an ecological disaster. The Guardians started experimenting with terraforming another world and eventually were successful on the planet Oa. Oa has been their home ever sense.
While the “Green Lantern Bible” has not been published, a portion of it was printed in Niven’s collection Playgrounds of the Mind.
If you are a fan of Larry Niven’s work, try to track down a copy of the Green Lantern graphic novel Ganthet’s Tale
Was Niven the first science fiction author to influence Green Lantern? It depends who you ask.
E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen series first appeared in 1937. In 1959, John Broome and Julius Schwartz recreated the Green Lantern comic. In their version Green Lanterns were given power rings and assigned to police particular regions of the universe. The rings were given to them by an advanced alien race. In Lensmen, an advanced alien race (from the planet Arisia) takes the best of the Galactic Patrol and gives them a device called a lens to become super policemen of the various space sectors. Broome and Schwartz admitted to hearing of the Lensmen series but they never read it. I was fortunate enough to meet Schwartz the year before he died. Based on my meeting with him, I would believe him. He had a passion for comics and science fiction (he worked in the field before moving to comics) that would make me tend to believe him if he said he had not read the series.
In the eighties, Mike Barr wrote Green Lantern. He is a fan of Lensmen and named a couple of the Green Lanterns Arisia and Eddore as his tribute to the series he loved.
Ron Howard and J. Michael Straczynski are working on a film based on the Lensmen series. It will be interesting to see how it gets compared to the Green Lantern movie.
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[...] Comment: Larry Niven & Green Lantern, posted by Grasping For the Wind [...]
Great post. It’s cool to see GL’s hard SF roots. I’ve always liked that about GL but I feel it’s one of the major things that the movie got wrong. Both Thor and GL tried to show the hero in two different worlds: the SFF and the real one. Where Thor’s SFF world worked, it just felt weird in GL.