Dyson Spheres in Popular Culture - Literature

Literature

• Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon. The novel which inspired Freeman Dyson to propose the concept of the Dyson sphere - he has suggested that "Stapledon sphere" would be a more accurate term for the technology.
• The Star Trek novel The Starless World by Gordon Eklund.
• The Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Dyson Sphere by George Zebrowski, Charles R. Pellegrino. A follow-up to "Relics".
• The novels Orbitsville, Orbitsville Departure, and Orbitsville Judgement by Bob Shaw.
• The Ringworld series of novels by Larry Niven feature a Dyson Ring which requires an entire orbit.
• The "Journal Entries" from Elf Sternberg use a ringworld as their home called Pendor.
• The novel Spinneret by Timothy Zahn (Dyson net).
• The novel The World Is Round by Tony Rothman. Inhabited on the outside, central body is a black hole.
• Two novels by Frederik Pohl & Jack Williamson — These are notable in that the sphere in these novels is inhabited on the outside, producing an unusual environment with both very low gravity and an atmosphere hundreds of miles deep. Light is provided by clouds of bioluminescent organisms which feed on heat radiating from the "ground".
  • Farthest Star (1975)
  • Wall Around a Star (1983)
• The Commonwealth Saga (2002–2005) and Void Trilogy (2007–2010) by Peter F. Hamilton. In Pandora's Star, the sudden disappearance of two separate star systems separated by several light-years, called the Dyson Pair, prompts the building of a faster than light starship, Second Chance, to uncover reason behind the disappearance. It is heavily theorised by characters that both stars have been enclosed in Dyson Spheres. However, upon arrival, the Second Chance discovers that both systems have instead been sealed behind immense forcefields to imprison a hostile alien lifeform, not physical shells. In The Evolutionary Void the Sol system (including Earth) is entrapped behind a similar forcefield, which was derived from the Dyson Pair technology.
• The novel Across a Billion Years by Robert Silverberg.
• The novel The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter, a sequel to The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, depicts an alternate version of the future depicted in the original work, in which a Dyson sphere is built around the sun, and the dark area beneath its inner shell is inhabited by variants on the dark-dwelling Morlocks of the original work.
• The novel The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons, featuring a partly completed sphere, being grown using advanced biotechnology.
• The short story Star Light, Star Bright by Robert J. Sawyer.
• The novel Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer.
• The Doctor Who New Adventures novel The Also People by Ben Aaronovitch.
• The novel Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks; several Spheres mentioned only in passing as casualties of the Idiran-Culture War.
• The novel House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds; composed of thousands of individual rings surrounding stars.
• The novel Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds; surrounds a single planet only.
• The novel Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds (Passing reference).
• The novel Russian Spring by Norman Spinrad. (Brief mention in a news blurb)
• The novel Vacuum Flowers by Michael Swanwick.
• The Cageworld novels Search for the Sun!, The Lost Worlds of Cronus, The Tyrant of Hades, and Star-Search by Colin Kapp. Features concentric nested Dyson shells built from collected interstellar matter, also inhabited on their outer surfaces.
• The novel Illegal Aliens by Nick Pollotta and Phil Foglio mentions two Dyson shells. The first, simply called "Big", is the headquarters of a galactic federation. The second is unnamed and apparently consists of nothing but nested Dyson shells built by an insane race to cope with their sun getting smaller.
• The novel The Singers of Time by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson visits a parallel universe totally covered in Dyson shells, where only the farthest quasars are visible (already covered, but the light from them is still traveling). They were constructed by a formerly biological race that slowly converted their bodies to cyborgs and then full robots, the only logical evolution being the creation of a Type V or VI civilization.
• The novel Heaven's Reach by David Brin explains a more advanced (and more fragile) form of the Dyson sphere known as a Criswell Structure. This type of sphere utilizes fractal geometry to further maximize the light capturing inner surface as well as increase natural stability. Billions of these have been placed around slow burning red stars for extended periods of habitation by ancient life-forms awaiting transcendence to a higher form of life.
• The novel Polity Agent by Neal Asher He describes under 'The Cassius project' a Dyson sphere under construction.
• The short story Hold Until Relieved, by William H. Keith, Jr. Part of Keith Laumer's Bolo universe. Galactic core surrounded by Dyson shell.
• The novel "Federation World", by James White, partially set in a terraced Dyson sphere, which rotates to provide internal centrifugal force as a substitute for gravity. Since the terraces have different radii of rotation, alien species native to multiple gravity levels can be accommodated.
• In the novel Accelerando by Charles Stross, a Dyson swarm (possibly a Dyson bubble) of computronium forms a massive matrioshka brain around the sun providing virtual space for trillions of uploaded human minds and corporate AI.
• At the conclusion of the novel Halo: Ghosts of Onyx, the majority of the human survivors travel through a rift in slipspace to reach a habitat built by the ancient Forerunners that is separated from normal space and guarded by a massive latticework of automated drones. This habitat is actually a compressed Dyson Sphere, and is to serve as an effective bomb shelter from the activation of the Halo Array.
• The technology is alluded to in the short story The Last Question by Isaac Asimov.
• The novel Old Man's War by John Scalzi, an enemy alien race that is far more advanced than the Human civilization has a Dyson Sphere around their sun powering a shield around their home world.
• Though it never refers to it by name, the novel Elven Star, volume 2 of the Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman features a Dyson Sphere featuring 4 suns in its center.
• The novels The Ring of Charon and The Shattered Sphere by Roger MacBride Allen feature a Dyson Sphere and the space surrounding it.
• The novels The Book of the Long Sun saga by Gene Wolfe features a large population of people living in a massive Dyson Sphere like spaceship called the Whorl, with a long sun in the centre.
• The novel Debatable Space by Philip Palmer briefly mentions a Dyson Swarm of habitats around Sol known as the Dyson Jewels.
• In the fantasy series The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, the world of Pryan resembles a Dyson Sphere.
• The novel The Architects of Hyperspace by Thomas R. McDonough features an abandoned space station which is formed of concentric rings orbiting a star near the center of the universe.
• The novel Second Genesis by Donald Moffitt is largely set on one disc of a Dyson Swarm composed of massive orbital aligned discs whose shadows overlap to completely surround a star, to act as energy-collectors for an interstellar communicator.
• The novel The Berserker Throne and the related short story Some Events at the Templar Radiant by Fred Saberhagen. The fortress "Templar Radiant" is a stone sphere constructed around a starlike source of inverse gravity.
• The novel Hex by Allen Steele
• The novel Stamping Butterflies by Jon Courtenay Grimwood