In the fading years of the last century, unknown to us, another civilization was dying.

The planet circled a red sun, according to "Superman's Return to Krypton"---a fictitious tale, but one that has lots of real details about Krypton, written by Jerry Siegel. Siegel, at least, never commented if it was a red giant star or a red dwarf star. It is far more likely that it is a red dwarf star. Red giants usually don't stay long enough in the main sequence for life to develop, and though I have reasons to doubt Kryptonians originated there, some of the lifeforms surely did.

Also, red giant stars are much rarer than red dwarf stars,the latter being the most common stars of all. So the odds greatly favor Krypton's sun being a red dwarf sun.

Now, a world like the Earth would have to be very close to a red dwarf sun to be warm enough to support humanlike life. If it were that close, tidal forces would "lock" one side towards the sun, always. Yet we know from Siegel's writings that Krypton did have nighttime.

The answer is simple. Krypton's atmosphere has a strong "greenhouse" effect. If Earth were moved to Venus' orbit, it would be hotter, but not much hotter. Yet Venus itself traps the heat from the sun within its atmosphere, so that you could melt lead on its surface. Krypton has a similar greenhouse effect that allows it to have livable temperatures even through relatively far from a red dwarf sun....at a distance where the Earth would be covered in the coldest of ice ages.

We know the world itself was larger and its gravity more intense than Earth's, and had three moons. (Two moons are mentioned in "Superman's Return to Krypton" and another Siegel story talks about the destruction of a third.) The mention of its size and gravity was made as early as Superman #1, when Kryptonians were also portrayed as (correctly) leaping over buildings in their native environment. Krypton was what Poul Anderson once called, fittingly, a "superterrestrial" world...more in mass than Earth but less than a gas giant. Probably the gravity was no more than 1.25 or 1.5 times Earth's...any more than that and Krypton would have certainly been a gas giant, and its atmosphere unbreathable to humanoids.

Its greater mass was also aided by its composition, because the heavier elements were very common on Krypton. Gold was so common it was worthless, and there was a "gold volcano". That sounds like a fairy tale, but actually it indicates that Krypton was probably formed soon after a supernova went off relatively close, because heavier elements are formed in supernova. If gold is so prevelent near the surface, many transuranic elements, many of which would have been barely formed in the laboratory, if that, sank to Krypton's core. (Read SATAN'S WORLD by Poul Anderson or MIRKHEIM by the same author to see examples of how other such worlds might form.)

The large internal heat of Krypton, doubtless helped by its percentage of heavy elements, doubtless made it more prone to krypton-quakes, but also made it warmer than Earth would be at that difference from a red dwarf sun, also. That strange combination of transuranic elements eventually led to its destruction, though, the gigantic explosion that blew apart Krypton. (Either that, or a quantum black hole fell into the core of Krypton, and eventually released its energy in a cataclysmic explosion.)

Before I get any further, I better lay out my criteria for what stories I consider valid, and what stories I feel free to dismiss out of hand. I take the historical research method.

Let's take stories of King Arthur for an example. There are thousands of stories about King Arthur, all contradictory. Obviously, all of them can't be right. Many are absurd, and violate history as we know it. Yet we know there was a real Celtic warchief named Arthur.

Now, historians would examine more closely, and give more "weight", more validity--- to the earlier stories about him, the ones written closer to the time when it happened, and also, if they could identify it for sure, the first stories that mentioned him would be given the most weight. Well, since Jerry Siegel wrote the first stories of Superman (and Joe Shuster drew them), I give more "weight" to Siegel's stories than to other writers, no matter how good they were---such as Otto Binder, Edmond Hamilton, Cary Bates, and John Byrne. This is no disrespect to those excellent writers, but they can't all be right.

One must choose. Although I feel free to adapt the stories by other writers if they don't contradict Siegel's stories, especially the earliest, if I feel there is a reasonable chance of them hearing of the true story. I also sometimes dismiss them out of hand---when they don't meet that criteria. I do not give them as much weight as even the latest or silliest of Siegel's stories.

Similarly, I give more validity to Siegel's earliest stories than his later stories, since in the later stories he was trying to work within the ever-growing and often-contradictory mythos being built by an entire group of writers on a character he no longer was considered to have the rights to. That's not to say there aren't germs of truth in the later stories, and where possible and not conflicting with earlier stories, I have adapted them. Yet the earliest stories have the most validity.

Just wanted to show you my reasoning. This is not John Byrne's cross between Asimov's Solaria (THE NAKED SUN) and the movie THX-1138, which he called Krypton. This is not Edmond Hamilton's Krypton (as much as I love the Nightwing and Flamebird stories) or Otto Binder's. This is primarily Jerry Siegel's Krypton...with adaptions made for scientific reality.

Looking at the Siegel stories...even the later Superboy stories, which were fictional---we see many details that Siegel gave Krypton that might be true, and certainly, in the absence of any other sources, I feel free to adapt such details. Thus, it is fair to say that many of the details given in "Superman's Return to Krypton", even though Superman did not go back in time, etc. I am going to treat as true. In fact, many of the stories in the comics that created the sixties' vision of Krypton are Siegel's. He introduced many interesting motifs.

For instance, he mentions many natural wonders. Rainbow Valley, where a rainbow is ever-occuring (perhaps the moisture in that valley is overwhelming) and Fire Falls, where magma pours right out in a odd "firefall".

The aforementioned Gold Volcano is another geological feature of great beauty, and the Jewel mountains (not absurd if you consider the higher concentration of heavier elements on Krypton. Another writer said they were the fossilized remains of "jewel-birds" but that wasn't confirmed by Siegel, so remains, at the least problematic. More likely they were crystalline formations caused by the heavy elements) lend a lovely touch to the world of Krypton.

Another place is Meteor Valley, where a huge meteorite impacted the world in prehistoric times.

A word about the name, "Krypton". We're not sure what Krypton's real name is, what Kryptonians called it. "Krypton" of course, is the name of an element, but if you examine it closely, you'll see what a sly game Siegel was playing. "Krypton" is derived from the same word where we get cryptology, the puzzling out of secret codes and writing. It means "unknown" and the discoverer of the element Krypton was calling it "the unknown element"---because it was unknown until then. We might call it Element X instead....

....Or planet X.

Siegel was saying that Krypton was...unknown. A world unknown to human science.

It's possible that the name is unprouncable by human throats, or at the very least hard to pronounce by English speakers. At the time that Siegel first chronicled Superman, in the mid to late thirties', it's very probably that Superman himself didn't know the name. Later, he learned much more about "Krypton"--- as we'll continue to call it.

Actually, the first one to call it "Krypton" was Jonathan Abnednego Kent, his foster-father. Though a farmer, he had a strong interest in scientific matters, and knew his Latin and Greek. When he finally explained to Clark why he was so different...in the same walk in GLADIATOR where Abednego Danner tells his son Hugo of being injected with a serum as a fetus...(that explanation was entirely fictional on Wylie's part.)...they decided they had to call Clark's home world something, so Jonathan suggested "Krypton", for unknown. The name stuck.

Krypton had a huge and varied biosphere, full of flora and fauna. We're not sure if the life is native to that sphere, or brought in from outside. In "The Hall of Worlds" I make the case that the Kryptonian race---the humanoid race that Superman was a part of---are actually descended from genetically-altered earthlings kidnapped by another race and used as servants and food---until there was a Great Revolt. If that is correct, it occured hundreds of thousands of years ago. Kryptonians had no idea (or at least, no hint is given) that they realized they were not native to that world, and tales of the Great Revolt faded into their prehistory. Many of the plants and animals are not earthly, however. If Krypton's sun is a red giant, though, they would have not have had time to evolve, so they would have had to have been in from outside. If instead Krpton's sun was a red dwarf, which is my preferred choice, there would have been plenty of time for life to evolve.

FLORA:

Siegel wrote the first and second stories about Krypton's Scarlet Jungle, its equivelent of the Amazon rain forest. The coloring of those plants seem to be crimson or purple, indicating they use a different compound from the green clorophyll to get energy from sunlight.

The other flora mentioned by Siegel are the "singing flowers" which can serenade lovers. Possibly flowerlike plants on Krypton use sound, rather than scent, to attract insectlike pollenators. I suspect they don't make noise on their own, but are living windchimes, relaying on air currents to make their tunes.

As happened on earth, and its large variety of flowers made even larger by gardeners breeding and refinining flowers, so Kryptonian gardeners might have bred flowers to produce a greater range of sounds, so that a group of varied flowers would sound like a virtual orchestra.

FAUNA:

There are several dangerous animals on Krypton. One mentioned especially by Siegel is the thought-beast, a huge rhinoceros sized beast with a horn on its snout...and a large screen on its head that showed what it was thinking. It's evolutionarily puzzling, since it would telegraph to its prey what it's intentions are. The only purpose it might serve is communication between thought-beasts---signalling to another such beast where the food was, for instance, the way bees do a special dance that tells other bees where the pollen is. That would indicate that they are at least to a certain extent, herd aninmals.

It's worth noting that the Metal-eater was considered "dangerous" by the Kryptonians...but doubtless not personally to them, but dangerous to their buildings and structures.

One other lifeform mentioned by Siegel is puzzling. Dogs. In "Superman's Return to Krypton" Superman meets two canines who are Krypto's parents. Now, Krypto is an invention by Otto Binder, and sadly, there was no "real" Krypto. (Actually, young Clark Kent/Hugo Danner did have a dog, whom he loved dearly, a white mutt...but he had no superhuman powers. It was actually Jonathan's suggestion to call him "Krypto" after their made-up name for Clark's home planet. Binder somehow heard of that latter detail, and it suggested a story...)

Still, I won't dismiss out of hand that there might be hounds on Krypton, which is no less unlikely than that there are humans on Krypton. They might have been brought with the earthling humans that were captured by the kidnapping race. In fact, one other world has a very humanoid race---and a very canine race. Apokolips, as shown by Jack Kirby, had a humanoid race but they used a "dog cavalry", where gigantic hounds, as large as horses, were bred...yet still unmistakably canine. In my "Hall of the Worlds" I postulated that Apokolips had much the same origin as the Kryptonian humanoid race. So it's possible, at least...

Edmund Hamilton said that Kandor, the Kryptonian-city-in-a-bottle, had telepathic hounds, which followed a trial by telepathy. Sadly, there seems to be little truth in that, or in Kandor either. With regret, and with genuine fondness, I dismiss it.

Other animals included a two-headed golden lionlike animal; a "rockpecker bird" that can shake the sides of a cliff and cause avalanches. (Like the metal-eater, it has adapted to the abundence of heavier elements and metals on Krypton than is the norm on Earth.)

In the sea, there is a large sharklike creature that Siegel called a tyranno-shark.

It's worth noting that in their zoos, each of the animals is equipped with a collar. If by any chance they escape, a zookeeper can, with the flick of a switch, release a gas from their collar which will put the animal to sleep.

The primary sentient race, as I said, were genetically altered earthlings, most likely. There is too much evidence of mankind's origins on Earth, and it is too much of a coincidence to feel that the Kryptonians---especially on a high-gravity, planet with a red sun...would look so much like us.

However, genetically altered to simulate millions of years of more and more efficient evolution, they could leap hundreds of yards and lift huge masses. They could be buried under the wreckage of a building, without hardly a scratch. A woman, not long after giving birth, can make huge hundred-yard leaps...and a child is even stronger than you would think. A newborn might be barely kept in a young mother's arms, to keep from leaping out, and might be able to give the doctor delivering him a black eye.

Those differences, that seem so great to us, probably would have seemed so commonplace to the Kryptonians as not to mention them.

The males developed expanded vision and enhanced hearing around age forty, the females at a much earlier age. This vision multiplies images many times, like a telescope, and also allows one to detect a much larger range of wavelengths than normal human eyes. The x-rays would be almost nonexistent to see by on Earth or circling a red star. I suspect that Kryptonians themselves can release x-rays, a "safety valve" for the energies building inside them.

Where do Kryptonians get their power??? It can't be solely from foodstuffs. The human body is not that efficient, but it's at least forty per cent efficient. Even if the human body was one hundred per cent efficient, it would only a little over double the power it gets from foodstuffs.

Alas, it cannot be from the difference between red solar radiations and yellow solar radiations. Sunlight on Earth only gives a horsepower-and-a-half per square yard...there's a reason why the living things that depend on sunlight cannot move (plants)---not enough energy is concentrated in sunlight. And if Superman stored the solar power over decades and then lifted up a truck over his head, it would use up all the solar power...and it would be decades before he could do it again.

I see two possibilities. Either a very tiny amount of a Kryptonian's waste products are converted directly to energy...or Kryptonians somehow have a field that extends for hundreds of yards around their bodies which absorbs potential energy from other objects. It is a mystery, and these are best guesses, no more. My guess is the former, not the latter, though, since such would mean if you had a multitude of Kryptonians close together, they would be weaker...and that doesn't seem to be the case.

(The suggestion that Kryptonians get their strength almost entirely from the gravitational difference was first proposed by Otto Binder, and is contradicted by the earliest Siegel stories. Siegel adapted this and the later red sun/yellow sun explanation of the powers in his later stories, to conform with the evolving idea of Superman in the comics. The Superman of the late fifties or the early sixties in the comics couldn't have been killed by a mere planet exploding. He would have just shook it off and flown away at faster-than-light speed. But that is a result of almost constant exagerration by later writers. It was that latter suggestion that prompted Larry Niven to suggest that Krypton was actually a black dwarf sun---but if the Kryptonians could leap huge distances with the amazing gravity of a black dwarf sun, their strength would be incalculable and not the Superman shown in the early stories.)

The Kryptonians were long-lived by our standards, but not immortal. They eventually did age and die.

The technology of the Kryptonian race, although they weren't getting into space travel until just before their planet exploded, was mind-staggering.

Education was mainly a product of some sort of advanced sleep-learning (an "education-pillow" could give one all the facts one needed for a highly skilled technical job in one night---if one had the aptitude.) There were also education centers where advanced students got additional facts "fed" into their minds while they were awake, wearing caps tied directly into some main information conduit or computer.

Not only could information be fed directly into the mind, but it could work the other way. Artists would take their mind's eye conceptions and transpose them directly onto canvas.

They had mastered the secrets of anti-gravity. Night clubs where they could dance were suspended in the sky,as were hotels. (For that matter, there were individual vessels that one could drive like a car that travelled in the sky, but it was unsure if that was anti-gravity or jet technology at work.)

The Youth Patrol, that catches law-breaking juveniles, carried an interesting device. A ray was shown on a possible offender. If they told the truth, the individual would glow with a blue light. If the offender lied, they would glow with a multi-colored light.

Siegel mentioned the Phantom Zone several times, but the Phantom Zone itself was an invention of Robert Bernstein. The bulk of evidence seems to be that the Phantom Zone was fictional, and Siegel just went along with using it as a plot device in some of his stories, to stay in line with the then-current Superman stories. It's possible that the Phantom Zone was a Daxxamite invention, a last place of safety. It's notable that Bernstein also wrote the Mon-El story.

Genuises could be perserved in crystal globes after their death and give advice to the living, for their brain would remain alive and able to give advice. Or they could be preserved in a "brain bank" of chemicals where they could share their thoughts with Kryptonian society long after their bodies died.

Their "telescopes" were so advanced that they could examine with ease worlds in other solar systems, to even groundlevel details. Obviously they are using something more than ordinary optical principles, using a breaktrhough as breathtaking as Piers Anthony's MACROSCOPE. (Jor-El had determined that Earth was the nearest world whose atmosphere could support their kind of life. That means he must be on the opposite side of the galaxy from us from Rann, which circles the nearest star to us, Alpha Centauri.

They had 3-dimensional holographic television, that they certainly used to convey news.

Entertainment and Art on Krypton were interesting. They had their equivelents of movies, called emotion-movies, and it may be impressions of emotions of the major characters were fed directly in their brain while watching it.

As mentioned before, artists would directly put the impressions of their brain on a painting via advanced technology.

Kryptonians enjoyed music, often given by their remarkable flowers.

They also enjoyed dancing, and had dance clubs, like the Sky Palace, albeit in mid-air.

They enjoyed swimming, also, in anti-gravity globe-like pools.

Customs include rituals for their marriage ceremonies. Individuals exchange colored bracelets, with a unique combination of colors individual for that couple. Busts of the parents of the bride and groom were placed in the rooms outside the ceremony.

We know that Krypton was ruled by a ruling council. Whether it was the strict technocracy that some stories exhibit, a ruling council of the greatest scientists, is not known. We do know the ruler of the council at the time of Krypton's doom was called Retoz. (Or possibly Re-Toz?)

We know they did have a military, either to maintain order within Krypton or to guard it against any external enemies from the stars. A "General" Zod discovered how to make imperfect duplicates of himself who became mindless soldier-duplicates, and almost took over Krypton. He was stopped by Jor-El, among others.

There was a city named Kandor. It was destroyed, not shrunk, by the alien known as Brianiac. It would take the entire energy of a sun to shrink a man to microscopic size, and once you did, the cube-square law would make things behave very differently. To shrink an entire city would take the energy of a galaxy. Mighty as he was, if Brainiac had that kind of power, he could have easily defeated Superman, not to mention demolish the Earth and the solar system. (It's possible that Brainiac made a nano-replica of a Kryptonian city like Kandor before its destruction, all the better to study the Kryptonians, and placed it in a bottle--- and that's what inspired the story of the "bottle" city of Kandor.)

We know a very little about the population of Krypton. Among them was Ken-Dal, Jor-El's older friend, who built (with Jor-El) a space-ark to save millions of Kryptonians---but they built it in Kandor, and Ken-Dal and the Kandorians were destroyed.

Garf-Og was a great scientist whose mind was preserved after his death in a crystal globe that served as life-support for his brain. He was given to Jor-El to give advice.

There were several fiends who afflicted Kryptonian a society: and in a century that held Hitler and Stalin, we can't point any fingers. "General" Zod found a process to duplicate himself imperfectly, and make mindless drones as soldiers.

"The Mighty Gazor" (Or Ga-Zor?) was an extremely old man who had led a lifetime of "scientific villainy" and tried to take Krypton with him with his krypton-quake producing machine. Luckily, Jor-El found him with the shock-wave locator-rod he invented and destroyed Gazor's machine.

Jax-Ur was trying out a new explosive on a falling meteorite, which if it succeeded, would be mighty enough to help him conquer Krypton. Unfortunately, it missed the meteor...and hit one of Krypton's three moons. This one was large enough to be inhabited by a small moonbase, yet the explosion was so devastating that it split the moon into four huge pieces that fell into their red sun. Doubtless such a mighty explosion had to use a large quantity of anti-matter...a fearsome "explosive" indeed.

Like other human communities, Krypton had its celebrities...like the beautiful and glamorous Lyla Lerroll, an emotion-movie actress who was a personal friend to both Jor-l/Jor-El and Lora/Lara.(She fell in love with Kal-El, a distant relation of Jor-L's---his lab assistant at the missle/rocket base where Jor-L worked...and for whom Jor-L named his son. Kal-El died in a freak accident on Lyla's set, and their romance inspired the plot of "Superman's Return to Krypton".)

There was the aforementioned Retoz, who ran the Council that rejected Jor-El's appeals.

Next door to Jor-El was a family which included a mischevious "juvenile delinquint" named Dev-Em, whose young friends delighted in wrecking Kryptonian society in destructive ways. He and his family did not survive the explosion of Krypton, but much of the first half of his story was true, and inspired the second. (One note, he and his friends didn't use jet-packs---they just used the immense leaps that are a Kryptonian's birthright.)

Of course, the most famous Kryptonians of all, to earthlings, anyway, are Jor-l/Jor-El and Lora/Lara---the parents of Superman.

This was the world which birthed Superman.

Those interested with comments, suggestions, things I have forgotten, things I messed up, contact me at...
E-Mail:al.schroeder@nashville.com

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Speculations Copyright © Al Schroeder. "Superman", of course, is currently owned by DC Comics/Warner Communications. All other characters copyrighted by their respective owners.