Aldebaran in Fiction - Literature

Literature

• The Cthulhu Mythos (1921- ), fictional universe created by H. P. Lovecraft et al. Hastur is a fictional entity in the Mythos, ambiguously referred to as a place, an object, or a deity, and developed into a Great Old One by August Derleth. Robert W. Chambers uses Hastur to represent both a person and a place associated with the names of several stars, including Aldebaran: more particularly, Hastur inhabits the shores of Lake Hali on a planet circling a dark star near Aldebaran.
• Lensman series (1934–48), novels by E. E. "Doc" Smith. The Lensman series takes place over a vast sweep of space and on many different worlds. These include the planets Aldebaran I, occupied by the Wheelmen, and the scene of Kimball Kinnison's first major injury requiring hospitalization (leading to his first meeting with Clarrissa MacDougall), and Aldebaran II, one of the first human-settled planets, and the scene of several of Kinnison's adventures. Smith's work is strongly identified with the beginnings of US pulp science fiction as a separate marketing genre, and did much to define its essential territory, galactic space, featuring many planets such as those orbiting Aldebaran. The Lensman series is considered far superior to Smith's Skylark series.
• The Starmen (1952), novel by Leigh Brackett. Llyrdis, the fourth planet of Aldebaran, is the home of the starfaring Vardda. The novel is a space opera in which the Vardda are the only race that is able to endure the rigors of interstellar travel. Boucher and McComas gave the novel a lukewarm review, describing it as "an able job of writing a completely routine and uncreative space opera." The book, a prime example of the midcentury shift in science fiction authors' attention away from planets in our own Solar System to worlds in orbit around other stars, pales in comparison to Brackett's best single work of the same period, The Long Tomorrow.
• The Stars My Destination (1956), classic science fiction novel (titled Tiger! Tiger! in the UK) written by Alfred Bester. After his apotheosis in the burning cathedral, the legendary Gully Foyle teleports stark naked to the vicinity of several stars, including Aldebaran: "Aldebaran in Taurus, a monstrous red star of a pair of stars whose sixteen planets wove high velocity ellipses around their gyrating parents." The interstellar "jaunting" sequence is typical of Bester's signature pyrotechnics, his quick successions of hard, bright images, and mingled images of decay and new life.
• "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" (1960), short story by Mack Reynolds, published in Amazing Stories. So, a couple of aliens walk into a bar... Conversation ensues. "I felt your mind probe back a few minutes ago ... Telepathy is a sense not trained by the humanoids. If they had it, your job—and mine—would be considerably more difficult. Let's face it, in spite of these human bodies we're disguised in, neither of us is humanoid. Where are you really from, Rupert?"/ "Aldebaran," I said. "How about you?"/ "Deneb," he told me, shaking. We had a laugh and ordered another beer. "What're you doing here on Earth?" I asked him./ "Researching for one of our meat trusts. We're protein eaters. Humanoid flesh is considered quite a delicacy. How about you?"/ "Scouting the place for thrill tourists. My job is to go around to these backward cultures and help stir up inter-tribal, or international, conflicts—all according to how advanced they are."
• The Lathe of Heaven (1971), novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. Protagonist George Orr, in an alternate-reality Oregon, is an effective dreamer: his dreams have the power to alter reality. Under the guidance of Svengali-like sleep researcher William Haber, he dreams into existence a series of increasingly intolerable alternate worlds: dreaming for "world peace," he creates an alien invasion of Earth's lunar colony Moondome (uniting humanity against the threat). The attackers are "natives of a methane-atmosphere planet of the star Aldebaran, had to wear their outlandish turtle-like suits perpetually on Earth or the Moon, but they didn't seem to mind." In the 2008 Prentice paperback, the flying turtle-aliens and their Tauran homeworld are imagined in cover art by Timothy Goodman. Like all of Le Guin's work, Lathe is shaped around a recurrent motif—in this case the balance of the archetypal symbols of arrogance and submission.

• The Forever War (1974), novel written by Joe Haldeman. Protagonist William Mandella joins an elite task force assigned to counterattack the invading Taurans. The new soldiers depart for action, traveling via wormhole-like phenomena called "collapsars" that allow ships to cover thousands of light-years in a split second. In an expository section, Mandella explains the collapsar mechanism, as well as the derivation of the name adopted by humanity for the invaders: "This happened near Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus (see graphic), but since 'Aldebaranian' is a little hard to handle, they named the enemy 'Taurans'."
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), novel by Douglas Adams. Aldebaran, which is noted for its fine wines and liqueurs, is a subject of the ditty: Aldebaran's great, okay, / Algol's pretty neat, / Betelgeuse's pretty girls / Will knock you off your feet. / They'll do anything you like / Real fast and then real slow, ...
• Narabedla Ltd. (1988), novel by Frederik Pohl. On a planet orbiting Aldebaran, Narabedla Ltd. (Narabedla being the retrogram of Aldebaran) is a corporation that is owned by aliens and run by their human agents. The protagonist, an accountant for various famous performers, discovers that many of his best clients are disappearing—after they sign mysterious contracts for prolonged, lucrative series of private engagements. It turns out that Narabedla is a corporate impresario for artists' tours that cater to alien venues on alien worlds. Curious, our accountant signs up...
• Aldébaran (1994–1998), series of comic books by Luiz Eduardo de Oliveira (as by Léo). The series is set mostly on the Earthlike and human-inhabited world Aldebaran IV, often referred to simply as Aldebaran.
• Blue Mars (1996), novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. Jackie Boone, the fifth generation grand-daughter of original Mars colonist John Boone, takes an interstellar vessel to "a star near Aldebaran, where a Mars-like planet rolled in an Earth-like orbit around a sun-like sun." Having terraformed most of the Solar System, humankind is now off to terraform the galaxy. Robinson writes that, at "several percent" of the speed of light, the trip to Aldebaran will take 20 years. Since Aldebaran is about 65 light years away, the voyage would actually need to be made at 95% of the speed of light in order for relativistic time dilation to reduce the subjective timespan to a single score of years.
• Fallen Dragon (2001), novel by Peter F. Hamilton. Not the pushovers they were imagined to be, the villagers of Artoon resist the soldiers of the rapacious Zantiu-Braun corporation with the use of hyperadvanced technology provided them by a dragon-like alien being. Protagonist Lawrence Newton, disillusioned with the life of the interstellar mercenary, deserts his unit and joins the villagers in hijacking a company starship to search out the red-giant home system of the dragons, saying, "I don't need a deal. I'm going to help you anyway." / "What do you mean?" asked slowly. / "You want to take the dragon fragment to Aldebaran, right? The closest red giant, where all the real dragons are." Where they are indeed. When Denise and Lawrence arrive at the red star they quickly find millions of the kilometer scale dragons dwelling in deep space around Aldebaran.
• Johnny Mackintosh: Star Blaze (2010), novel by Keith Mansfield. In this second of the Johnny Mackintosh novels, Johnny's custom-built computer Kovac detects an extraterrestrial signal and he begins his adventures, leaving the Earth on a journey through time and space that takes him to a gas giant orbiting Aldebaran, where he falls through the deep atmosphere witnessing amazing creatures inspired by Carl Sagan’s TV series Cosmos.