Binary Stars in Fiction - Literature

Literature

The writer Jack Vance is an accomplished world-builder who, 60 years ago, provided a model for the planetary romance which has been in significant use by creators of speculative fiction ever since. He is further notable among science fiction authors for his frequent use of binary and multiple star systems in his stories: His worlds spin under multiple suns. His most ambitious works in this vein are the Durdane trilogy and Marune: Alastor 933, each of which is treated in detail below. His numerous less substantial explorations of the theme are described briefly here:

• "The Unspeakable McInch" (1948). Binary system: Sclerotto; the red sun, the blue sun. Magnus Ridolph tracks down an enigmatic criminal mastermind.
• "To B or Not to C or to D" (1950). Triple system: Jexieka; red giant Rouge, white Sol-like Blanche, dark companion Noir. Magnus Ridolph investigates a mysterious case of vanished agricultural workers.
• "The Devil on Salvation Bluff" (1955). Wildly chaotic quadruple system: Glory; Red Robundus, small yellow-green Urban, silver dwarf Maude, green cat’s-eye Faro. Uptight colonists learn to go with the flow of kaleidoscopic random episodes of daylight and dark.
• "The Gift of Gab" (1955). Binary system: Sabria; dull red giant Geideon, blue-green Atreus. The superintendent of a pelagic mining operation abruptly disappears.
• The Star King (1964). Binary system: red dwarf star, habitable dead star. Kirth Gersen seeks out a criminal’s secret hideaway on a dead star.
• The Green Pearl (1985). Binary system: Tanjecterly; green sun, lemon-yellow sun. Aillas searches for princess Glyneth, abducted to the world Tanjecterly.
• "The Stark" (outline for an unpublished work). Binary system: uninhabitable planets; red and blue binary. A star ark bearing the remnants of humanity ranges the galaxy seeking a home.

• "Nightfall" (1941) short story written by Isaac Asimov, probably the single most famous US science fiction story of all time, published in Astounding Science Fiction and expanded as the novel Nightfall with Robert Silverberg in 1990. The planet Lagash (Kalgash in the novel) resides in a sextuple star system, whose six suns—great golden Onos, red dwarf Dovim, actinic white dwarfs Trey and Patru, and blue-white Tano and Sitha—combine to provide eternal daylight, save once every 2049 years, when an eclipse plunges the planet into prolonged darkness (compare Marune: Alastor 933 by Jack Vance and the film Pitch Black with Vin Diesel, below). Scientists, foreseeing the hiatus, prepare their countrymen to endure a lightless season, but when night does fall the populace is driven mad by the unimagined sight of the myriad stars, and civilization collapses in chaos: ... turned his eyes toward the bloodcurdling blackness of the sky. / Through it shone the Stars! / There were thousands of them, blazing with incredible power ... a dazzling shield of terrifying light that filled the entire heavens / Their icy monstrous light was like a million great gongs going off at once. The Kalgash system is of type A-BC—D-EF: Kalgash's primary Onos orbits in binary with the close pair Trey and Patru, and this triplet orbits in binary at a higher hierarchical level with the remaining triplet comprising Dovim and Tano-Sitha.
• "Legends of Smith's Burst" (1959) - short story written by Brian Aldiss and published in Nebula Science Fiction. Jami Lancelo Lowther, interstellar picaresque adventurer, finds himself sold in slavery to the alien chimera Thrash Pondo-Pons on the planet Glumpalt, deep in the Hybrid Cluster of Smith's Burst. Thrash, leading his new acquisition home, dispatches him up a tall tree to spy out landmarks. From the highest branches Lowther, feigning bewildered panic, cries out "Master, do not gallop off and leave me here alone!" Clambering back to the ground, and dissembling vast relief, he relates the wonderful illusion produced by the magical tree. When his master climbs up to see for himself, Lowther steals his steed and makes good his escape; this is just the first of his many tricks and adventures under the four suns of Glumpalt: a monstrous pink thing, like a blob of custard; a more powerful yellow globe; a blazing white sun; and at last the black sun, an antimatter star that appears as "a great sooty ball, crammed with darkness, radiating blackness." The antilight emitted by the black sun cancels the ordinary light of the other three suns, and plunges the world into darkness.
• Solaris (1961), Polish language novel by Stanisław Lem, translated into French, then English in 1970. Earth scientists seeking to understand a nonhuman intelligence that is manifested by the world ocean of the planet Solaris achieve few insights, while the alien consciousness toys with their psyches with discomfiting results. The sentient sea flexes and ripples under the inconstant light of a pair of suns: In the warm glow of the red sun, mists overhung a black ocean with blood-red reflections, and waves, clouds, and sky were almost constantly veiled in a crimson haze. Now, the blue sun pierced the with a crystalline light. Like much of Lem's work in his "golden" period from 1956–1968, this work uses the mystery of a strange locality—in this case a watery planet heaving under the strange light of a red-blue binary system—to educate its protagonists into understanding the strengths and limitations of humanity.
• 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), novelization by Arthur C. Clarke of his script for the motion picture. In this well-known tale, a crystalline monolith sent by an alien race precipitates the dawning of intelligence among a group of hominid ancestors of human beings. Millions of years later, Dr. David Bowman finds himself on a mission to the Saturn system (along with the dicey computer HAL), where he discovers a much larger monolith that serves him as a star gate (it's full of stars!); it conducts him to the vicinity of a huge red giant no hotter than a glowing coal. Here and there, set into the somber red, were rivers of bright yellow—incandescent Amazons ... a second semidetached star, a mere point of blue-white radiance ... was moving at unbelievable speed across the face of the great sun ... immediately below it, drawn upwards by its gravitational pull, was a column of flame thousands of miles high ... In this immense setting an advanced alien technology transforms him into a new immortal entity, a Star Child, that can live and travel in space: In an empty room, floating amid the fires of a double star twenty thousand light-years from Earth, a baby opened its eyes and began to cry. This image, in both the novel and the screenplay for the film, shows an unhappy mankind crying out for a lost father ... the closest thing science fiction has yet produced to the longing for God.
• Nova (1968), novel written by Samuel R. Delany. Earth and the Pleiades Federation vie for influence in the Outer Colonies where mines produce trace amounts of the prized power source Illyrion. Lorq Von Ray, a scarred and obsessed captain from the Pleiades, recruits a motley crew of misfits to help him achieve political and economic dominance by securing a vastly greater amount of Illyrion—seven ton's worth—directly from the heart of a stellar nova. Two of his crew are the twins black Idas and albino Lynceos, hailing from Argos on the Colony world Tubman B-12 where they grew up "under three suns and a red moon."
• Durdane trilogy (1971-1973), series of novels (The Anome, The Brave Free Men, The Asutra) by Jack Vance. The world Durdane, inhabited by a quaint people with a rich tradition of music together with a pervasive preoccupation with color symbology—and ruled by the eponymous, anonymous Anome—is infiltrated by alien incubi (the Asutra) in a manner reminiscent of the Slugs in Heinlein's classic novel The Puppet Masters. Durdane threads a chaotic triple system of stars: The suns climbed the sky, the blaze of white Sassetta passing across the plum-red haunch of Ezeletta , blue Zael on the roundabout: three dwarf stars dancing through space like fireflies ... The suns tumbled up into the mauve autumn sky like rollicking kittens: Sassetta over Ezeletta behind Zael ... Etta swung up near the horizon, producing a false blue dawn, then pink Sassetta slanted sidewise into the sky, then white Zael, and again blue Etta.
• Marune: Alastor 933 (1975), novel written by Jack Vance. Marune is a planet in the Alastor Cluster, located in a quadruple star system, and home to the Rhunes, a peculiar, exacting people who inhabit their castles high up in the windy crags. The novel relates the tale of a young, amnesiac Rhunish duke and his struggles to regain his memory, his duchy, and his castle Benbuphar Strang. As important as the story is the setting: Marune orbits the orange dwarf Furad (●), which in turn orbits blue Osmo (●). Red Maddar (●) and green Circe (●) circle each other, and the pair form a hierarchical binary system of type AB-CD with Furad-Osmo, no two orbits being coplanar. The suns thus combine in the sky to produce a wonderful variety of illuminations, ... during which the character of the landscape changes profoundly. The population is naturally affected, and most especially the Rhunes ... About once a month, the land grows dark, and the Rhunes grow restless. —this is Mirk, when awful deeds transpire. The following gallery illustrates the different modes of Marune daylight, and shows which stars combine to produce them.

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), novel by Douglas Adams. Magrathea is an ancient planet located in orbit around the twin suns Soulianis and Rahm in the heart of the Horsehead Nebula (see graphic). Magrathea is a world whose economy was based on the manufacturing of bespoke planets for the wealthiest people in the universe, back in the days of the Galactic Empire (it was Magrathea that created the Earth). On Magrathea, hapless Arthur Dent is trying to convince depressed robot Marvin that the planet's double sunset is indeed worthy of admiration: But that sunset! I've never seen anything like it in my wildest dreams...the two suns! It was like mountains of fire boiling into space...We only ever had the one Sun at home.
• Helliconia (1982-1985), trilogy of novels (Spring, Summer, and Winter) by Brian Aldiss. Terrestrial humanity covertly observes, from their space station Avernus, the changing fortunes of the Helliconian "humans" and their rivals the bovine-descended phagors during the course of a Helliconian Great Year (~2500 Earth years). Helliconia lies in a binary star system consisting of the yellow-orange dwarf Batalix (its primary), which orbits in turn the white supergiant star Freyr in the constellation of Ophiuchus about a thousand light-years from the Sun. Aldiss explores in detail the astronomy, geology, climatology, geobiology, microbiology, religion, and society of a planet whose Great Year derives not from an inclined axis of rotation, but from the evolving geometry of the binary system. "As an exercise in world-building, the Helliconia books lie unassailably at the heart of modern since fiction ..."
• Expedition (1990), science fiction book written and illustrated by Wayne Barlowe. The year is 2366 and Earth, with the help of the technologically advanced Yma race, is embarking on an arduous repair of the effects of centuries of relentless environmental degradation. The book concerns the recent human eco-expedition to a binary star system approximately 6.5 light-years from Earth and its planet Darwin IV, home to a congeries of bizarre and utterly alien life forms. Barlowe writes as a sort of 24th century Audubon, presenting his findings in a collection of paintings, sketches, field notes, and diary entries that limn his explorations of this exotic world.
• Honor Harrington (1993- ), series of novels written by David Weber. The binary star system Manticore has three habitable planets and (importantly) one wormhole junction. The primary component Manticore A has two gentle habitable planets, Manticore (Manticore A III) and Sphinx. The secondary component Manticore B has one harsh habitable planet, Gryphon, home of rigorous conservatives and royalists. The star system is the capital system of the Star Empire of Manticore, whose Royal Manticoran Navy is the setting for protagonist Honor Harrington's Horatio Hornblower-like military career.