Tau Ceti in Fiction - Literature

Literature

• The Queen of Zamba (1949), and other novels, novellas, and short stories in the Viagens Interplanetarias series (1949–1991) by L. Sprague de Camp. Following upon first contact with men from Earth, the inhabitants of pre-technological Krishna struggle to adapt to a future that will be radically different from their past, assisted by a cast of rogues, heroes, and charlatans from our own planet. The Tau Ceti system contains the inhabited planets Krishna, Vishnu, and Ganesha. The Krishna tales (all having a "Z" in their titles) are early examples of the planetary romance, containing a blend of intelligent, exotic adventure and wry humor characteristic of de Camp's better work.
• The Caves of Steel (1954) and many following works in the Robot, Empire, and Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. In Asimov's fictional universe, the innermost planet orbiting Tau Ceti was mankind's first extrasolar planetary settlement: Aurora, the first world settled by the Spacers, and at its height possessing a population of 200 million humans and 10 billion robots. In Caves Doctor Han Fastolfe is debating the limitations of Earthmen with detective Lije Baley: "Why is the suggestion ridiculous? Earthmen have colonized planets in the past. Over thirty of the fifty Outer Worlds, including my native Aurora, were directly colonized by Earthmen."
• Time for the Stars (1956), novel by Robert Heinlein. This novel explores the twin paradox as one of a pair of twins linked by instantaneous telepathy sets out on a space voyage on the interstallar torchship Lewis and Clark. The starship, nicknamed "Elsie" (for the initials L.C.) encounters a number of more or less terrestrial planets including Constance, in orbit around Tau Ceti, a world later colonized by humans. Heinlein uses an obsolete value for Tau Ceti's luminosity—0.3 —and calculates that earthlike Constance must orbit its star at a radius of 50 million miles.
• Destination: Void (1966), novel by Frank Herbert. As an artificial intelligence experiment, a crew of clones is raised in isolation on the Moon believing that they are the crew of a sleeper ship dispatched on a colonizing expedition to the Tau Ceti system, captained by the Organic Mental Core, a disembodied human brain. The kicker is, Tau Ceti has no planets. It's all part of the experiment... This somewhat clotted tale, a distinctly minor effort, was published contemporaneously with Herbert's seminal Hugo and Nebula-award winning Dune—one of the most famous of all science fiction novels.

• Empire Star (1966), novella by Samuel R. Delany. The story revolves around the protagonist, Comet Jo, and a narrator-creature named Jewel. It is a tale of Comet Jo’s coming-of-age, his initiation into the ways of galactic society, his efforts to deliver an unspecified but important message to the Empire Star, and his encounter with a movement to bring an end to slavery. As the narrative opens, we meet Comet Jo at eighteen years of age. He has spent his entire life in a simplex society on Rhys, a satellite of the Jovian planet Tyre orbiting Tau Ceti: "Crimson Ceti bruised the western crags; Tyre, giant as solar Jupiter, was a black curve against a quarter of the sky..." The first insight of Jo's developing maturity is his realization that the "simplex" culture of his home is actually quite "complex"...
• A Gift from Earth (1968), Known Space novel by Larry Niven. The colony world Plateau in the Tau Ceti system lives by a rigorous code: All crimes are punishable by involuntary organ harvesting, while organ transplants are reserved to the benefit of the aristocracy. A robotic Bussard ramjet (see graphic) arrives from Earth, bearing a gift that will upset the unstable social balance on Plateau. The relative proximity of Tau Ceti to the Earth (with a turnaround point at UV Ceti) is an important plot element in the novel, enabling Plateau to be isolated from the mother planet, and yet still close enough to receive occasional cargoes via ramjet. The exploitation of the interstellar ramjet is just one of Larry Niven's many technical coups; as his career blossomed he was seen by many as the last best hope of hard science fiction with his inventiveness, his belief in the ultimately beneficial effects of technology, and his cognitive exuberance.
• The Iron Dream (1972), novel written by Norman Spinrad. In this satirical alternate history, Adolph Hitler emigrates as a youth to the United States, where he becomes first a pulp science fiction illustrator, then a hack genre author of distinctly limited talents. In a story-within-a-story he pens a potboiler novel entitled Lord of the Swastika, which culminates in legions of seven-foot, blond, superintelligent male SS clones being shipped off to Tau Ceti where they will establish a colony as the first step to a literal thousand-year reich and galactic domination.
• The Dispossessed (1974), novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. Urras and its moon/co-planet Anarres form a binary pair that in turn orbits Tau Ceti. Urras has two major nation-states named A-Io (a cold-war analog of the United States) and Thu (a Soviet analog); the two rivals are fighting a proxy war in a third state, Benbili. Anarchical Anarres has been settled by exiles from Urras; it is the home of the physicist Shevek, who in a conceptual breakthrough (a common Le Guin theme) develops the mathematics behind the ansible, a device enabling instantaneous communication throughout the galaxy.
• Cylinder van Troffa 1980), Polish language novel (Cylindra van Troffa) by Janusz Zajdel. This is the story of a group of astronomers who are approaching Earth after a 200-year journey from their colony world Filia (Latin for daughter) in the Tau Ceti system. They discover that their ancestors, the original colonists, were an intelligent elite who long ago left the Earth. At the time of their return our planet is no longer habitable.
• Downbelow Station (1981) and other Alliance-Union universe works, novels by C.J. Cherryh. The "Downbelow Station" of the title is Pell Station, orbiting the planet Downbelow in the Tau Ceti system. The Hisa are Downbelow's native inhabitants. Also called Downers by humans, they are gentle and friendly primate-like bipeds covered in brown fur with large eyes, possessing only the most rudimentary technology. Pell is the terminus of the "Great Circle" chain of space stations that links stars in the galactic vicinity of the Earth. As Cherryh states in her 2001 introduction to the novel, "... I selected a set of insignificant stars that lie near enough to each other to serve as a highway of waystops on the route to another truly interesting star, Tau Ceti ... which is Pell, by the way.

• "Tauf Aleph" (1981), short story by Phyllis Gotlieb. Tau Ceti IV is a marshy wet world inhabited by the Cnidori, hermaphroditic herbivores, and the Unds, giant creatures that prey upon them. The sometime caretaker and possibly the religious leader of the Cnidori is a lone human being: Samuel Zohar ben Reuven Begelman lived to a great age in the colony Pardes on Tau Ceti IV and in his last years he sent the same message with his annual request for supplies to Galactic Federation Central: "Kindly send one mourner/gravedigger so I can die in peace respectfully." Galactic Federation Central is unable to comply because Samuel is the last Jew anywhere in the galaxy—except perhaps for the Cnidori themselves.
• Shards of Honor (1986), leadoff novel in the Vorkosigan Saga (1986- ), series of science fiction novels and short stories by Lois McMaster Bujold. The Tau Ceti system is home to a major inhabited planet, ruled by a unified planetary government. Travel between star systems in the Vorkosigan universe is accomplished via wormholes (see graphic), spatial anomalies that allow instantaneous “jumps” between widely separated locations by means of five-dimensional space folding. Tau Ceti derives a great part of its galactic economic and military importance from its location near a multivalent wormhole junction.
• The Legacy of Heorot (1987), first novel in the Heorot trilogy (1987–1997) by Larry Niven, Steven Barnes, and Jerry Pournelle. Two hundred colonists arrive on the paradise world Avalon (Tau Ceti IV) to found a new community, having made the 100-year journey from Earth in suspended animation. The colonists, all selected for their outstanding physical and mental attributes, make a terrible discovery: Their intelligence and reasoning skill have been damaged in transit, a devolution that will ill serve them in their upcoming struggle with the native grendels for control of their new land.

• Hyperion (1989), novel by Dan Simmons. As the novel begins, the "Hegemony Consul" is interrupted in his playing of Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp minor to the dinosaurs of a savage jungle planet by a fatline message from the Hegemony administrative world of Tau Ceti Center. The message is of irrefutable authenticity, and its contents is unwelcome: he has been chosen to return to Hyperion as a member of the Shrike Pilgrimage.
• Rama Revealed (1993), novel written by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee, a sequel to the novels Rendezvous with Rama, Rama II, and The Garden of Rama. The Rama of the title is an alien starship, a prototypical Big Dumb Object that arrives without warning in the Solar System in 2130. Explorers discover that the huge vessel is a hollow world-environment in the style of an O'Neill cylinder (see graphic). Over the course of seven decades and four novels humanity slowly apprehends the nature of the purpose and the advanced alien intelligences behind the Rama artifacts; in "Revealed" a contentious crew of colonists sails the Rama II to a great tetrahedral Raman Node in the Tau Ceti system, its final destination where the purpose of the universe is revealed—to those who are deemed worthy enough—by the Nodal intelligence.
• Worldwar (1994–1996), tetralogy of novels written by Harry Turtledove. In this revised history, an Earth in the throes of World War II is invaded by a fleet of starships assembled for the purpose by The Race, natives of the desert world Tau Ceti II, which they call Home. Only three times in its 50,000-year history has this expansionist species of reptilian aliens organized such an armada, each time with the goal of subduing another civilization: the Rabotev, the Halessi, and now humanity. However, the invaders are in for a surprise, as their most recent intelligence on the Earth dates from the Middle Ages. Alternate world stories are a specialty of historian Turtledove, whose "thorough understanding of his source material gracefully infiltrates the fun and fantastication."
• Magnificat (1996), third novel in the Galactic Milieu series written by Julian May. When an informant lets slip that the Krondak navy is assembling a huge armada at their Eleventh Sector Base on Molokar, a planet of Tau Ceti ("less than twelve light-years from Earth"), the Rebellion faction of the Human Polity fears that the Milieu, an enemy alliance, may be planning a preemptive strike on the Earth, with the aim of cutting her off from her colonies. May's overall narrative line follows the Rebel protagonists as they flee via time travel from this 22nd-century catastrophe into our own deep prehistory—with the attendant struggle of two alien races for control of the young planet (in the earlier-published series Saga of Pliocene Exile)—and then forward again through time to the present era, all with a sense of romance and high purpose.
• Starplex (1996), novel by Robert Sawyer. When his deep-space station Starplex is heavily damaged in a catastrophic space battle, Keith Lansing needs to report to Earth—fast—and the fastest way possible is via the shortcut network: a vast array of hyperspace gateways, built by a mysterious progenitor race, enabling instantaneous interstellar travel. Lansing flies his shuttle into Starplex station's shortcut portal, expecting to rematerialize in the outskirts of the Tau Ceti system, stop by New Beijing on Tau Ceti IV, and then dash the last 11.8 light-years home to Earth. But something goes wrong, and he emerges from the shortcut in unknown space, bare kilometers from an indescribably beautiful, robins-egg blue, alien dragon ship. He is seen...
• Mosaic (1997) and Pathways (1999), Star Trek: Voyager novels written by Jeri Taylor as part of the film, television, and print franchise originated by Gene Roddenberry. USS Voyager captain Kathryn Janeway is the central protagonist of the television series, who must guide her ship back to Federation space after a "displacement wave" strands it on the far side of the galaxy, more than 70,000 light-years from Earth. She is also quite unattached—in the fictional tradition of Star Trek starship captains—and novelist Taylor provides her with a father and a fiancé, both tragically lost to separate accidents on the planet Tau Ceti Prime (her father, Vice Admiral Janeway, drowned under the polar icecap).
• Halo: First Strike (2003), novel set in the Halo universe and written by Eric Nylund. The Tau Ceti system is populated by a significant Covenant presence in 2552, in the form of a long-dreaded and massive fleet of warships that is destined to attack the Earth itself, together with the redoubtable refit and repair station Unyielding Hierophant. The station is destroyed by UNSC forces on September 13, 2552, along with the majority of the Covenant fleet.