Stars in fiction


Stars in fiction


Stars outside of the Solar System have been featured as settings in works of fiction since at least the 1600s.

Early depictions

Among the earliest depictions of stars as locations that can be visited is Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle's 1686 work Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds). The centuries that followed saw further such portrayals in Emanuel Swedenborg's 1758 work De Telluribus in Mundo Nostro Solari (Concerning the Earths in Our Solar System), C. I. Defontenay's 1854 novel Star ou Psi de Cassiopée (Star: Psi Cassiopeia), and Camille Flammarion's 1887 novel Lumen, but they remained rare throughout this time period. The early 1900s saw a few further interstellar voyages with Robert William Cole's 1900 novel The Struggle for Empire: A Story of the Year 2236, Jean Delaire's 1904 novel Around a Distant Star, and William Shuler Harris's 1905 novel Life in a Thousand Worlds before the concept became popular in the pulp era of science fiction.

As objects in the sky

Stars, and their positions in the night sky as seen from Earth, have long been regarded as holding a particular significance to humans. Constellations have been integrated into various mythologies, and the pseudoscience of astrology posits that the positions of the stars can be used to predict the future. Astrology very rarely features in science fiction (other than as a subject of satire), Piers Anthony's 1969 novel Macroscope being one of the few exceptions. Observations of stars as literal objects, points of light in the sky, nevertheless play important roles in several stories. In Isaac Asimov's 1941 short story "Nightfall", the first sight of a star-filled night sky, from a planet that is otherwise in daylight from at least one of its many suns for millennia at a time, drives people to madness. The opposite occurrence, of the stars disappearing from view, appears in Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 short story "The Nine Billion Names of God" and heralds the end of the universe.

Properties

For the most part, stars in fiction vary only in size and colour. Exceptions to this are rare and appear comparatively lately in the history of science fiction. A toroidal star is featured in Donald Malcolm's 1964 short story "Beyond the Reach of Storms". Sentient stars are depicted in Olaf Stapledon's 1937 novel Star Maker among others. Some stories including Bob Shaw's 1975 novel Orbitsville depict stars being enclosed by Dyson spheres.

Supernovae

Supernovae, extremely powerful stellar explosions, appear in multiple works. The notion that the Sun might explode in this manner serves as the basis for numerous disaster stories, though it is now recognized that this cannot actually happen as the necessary stellar conditions are not met. Earth is nevertheless threatened by the radiation from more distant supernovae in several works; for instance, Roger MacBride Allen and Eric Kotani's 1991 novel Supernova revolves around the calamitous impact of a supernova in the Sirius system on Earth, while Charles Sheffield's 1998 novel Aftermath portrays a supernova in the Alpha Centauri system disrupting modern electronics on Earth through its electromagnetic pulse. Besides humans, alien civilizations are also subject to the dangers of supernovae in some stories. In Arthur C. Clarke's 1955 short story "The Star", an alien species is found to have gone extinct some two millennia ago when their star exploded, creating the biblical Star of Bethlehem. In Poul Anderson's 1967 short story "Day of Burning" (a.k.a. "Supernova"), humans try to evacuate a planet inhabited by a pre-spacefaring society threatened by a supernova.

Neutron stars

Stars that have undergone supernova events can leave behind extremely dense remnants known as neutron stars. These objects are characterized by very strong gravitational fields yet comparatively small sizes on the order of a few kilometers or miles, resulting in extreme tidal forces in their proximity. In Larry Niven's 1966 short story "Neutron Star", a spacefarer is thus imperiled when the spacecraft approaches such a star too closely and the difference in gravitational pull between the near and far end threatens to rip it apart. In Gregory Benford's 1978 novel The Stars in Shroud, a neutron star is used for gravity assist maneuvers. Neutron stars are depicted as harbouring life on the surface and interior, respectively, in Robert L. Forward's 1980 novel Dragon's Egg and Stephen Baxter's 1993 novel Flux. Neutron star mergers release enormous amounts of radiation that could cause extinction events at interstellar distances; such an event devastates Earth in Greg Egan's 1997 novel Diaspora, and the anticipation thereof is portrayed in Baxter's 2000 novel Manifold: Space and the 2005–2006 television series Threshold.

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Black holes

A dying star with greater mass than that which produces a neutron star becomes an even more dense object: a black hole. These objects are defined by having so strong gravity that nothing—including light—can escape from them. The principal mechanism of black hole formation is the gravitational collapse of a massive star, but it is not the only theoretically possible one, and black holes that form as a result of other processes need not be stellar-mass but can range from microscopic to supermassive. One role black holes play in fiction is as a hazard to spacefarers—in modern science fiction, largely to the exclusion of regular stars serving that function. Another common motif is black holes being used as a means to traverse vast distances through space quickly, often by serving as the entrance to a wormhole; examples include Joe Haldeman's 1974 fix-up novel The Forever War and Joan D. Vinge's 1980 novel The Snow Queen. More exotically, the point of emergence is occasionally portrayed as another point in time—thus enabling time travel—or even an entirely different universe.

Real stars

Real stars make occasional appearances in science fiction, sometimes with planetary systems. A 2024 article in the Journal of Science Communication analysed a sample of 142 fictional exoplanets, nearly a third of which described as orbiting real stars, and found "an absence of influence of whether or not the planet setting is in a real star system on other worldbuilding characteristics".

The Alpha Centauri system is the closest star system to Earth—with Proxima Centauri being the closest of the system's stars—which has given it a special position in science fiction literature. Several stories of the first interstellar journeys have featured it as the intended destination. Among the earliest examples are the 1931 short story "Across the Void" by Leslie F. Stone and the 1935 short story "Proxima Centauri" by Murray Leinster. The spacecraft in the latter reaches its destination in less than a decade but has the capacity to function as a generation starship if needed; the use of an actual generation starship headed for the system was later depicted in the 1944 novel Far Centaurus by A. E. van Vogt, and the 1997 novel Alpha Centauri by William Barton and Michael Capobianco portrays such a mission being endangered by terrorists. Conversely, Liu Cixin's 2006 novel The Three-Body Problem depicts aliens from Alpha Centauri coming to Earth.

The Tau Ceti system is also a common setting in science fiction. James Nicoll, writing for Tor.com, attributes this to a confluence of factors that make it the nearest star (at a distance of approximately 12 light-years) that could plausibly harbour habitable planets, including having a favourable brightness and being a solitary rather than multiple star. In 2015, Andrew Liptak interviewed several authors about why they used Tau Ceti for their stories; in addition to the star's relative proximity to Earth, Ursula K. Le Guin (who wrote The Dispossessed, 1974) and Larry Niven (The Legacy of Heorot, 1987, with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes) cited the star's similarity to the Sun, while Kim Stanley Robinson (Aurora, 2015) pointed to the recent discovery of several exoplanets around Tau Ceti.

See also

  • Extrasolar planets in fiction
  • Sun in fiction

Notes

References

Further reading

  • Dean, John (April 1984). "Use of Stars in the Literature of Science Fiction and Fantasy". Metaphores. No. 9/10. pp. 91–100. ISSN 0290-6635.
  • Nicoll, James Davis (2018-07-23). "Classic Sci-Fi Star Systems Keep Getting Ruined by Science". Reactor. Archived from the original on 2024-05-05. Retrieved 2024-05-05.

Text submitted to CC-BY-SA license. Source: Stars in fiction by Wikipedia (Historical)



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