Vega in Fiction - Literature

Literature

• City at World's End (1951), novel by Edmond Hamilton. Government Center on Vega IV is the nexus of galactic administration in this novel about the unremarkable, middle-class Earth city of Middletown hurled by a nuclear explosion to a dead world in the unimaginably far-distant future.
• Foundation (1951), first novel in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Vega was the capital of the Vega Province in the Galactic Empire, one of the wealthiest provinces in the entire Galaxy. Until the revolt of the Anacreon Prefect, it traded with Terminus, capital of the Foundation. Salvor Hardin, the first mayor of Terminus City, considered the threat of being cut off from Vega to be one of the gravest perils faced by the nascent Foundation. One of the commodities Vega exported was tobacco, of notably high quality.

• Cities in Flight, (1955–1962), series of novels by James Blish. The Vega system is home to a civilization Blish names the Vegan Tyranny, which is blocking mankind's expansion into the galaxy. To fulfill their manifest destiny, men must defeat the Tyranny. The series' reflection of recent (from the vantage of 1955) earthly events, and the fascistic nature of the Vegan Tyranny, exhibit Blish's pessimistic view of the cyclic nature of history, as influenced by his reading of Spengler's The Decline of the West. Blish later recycled these ideas in his novelization of "Tomorrow is Yesterday" (1967), an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series.
• 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 Vega: "Vega in Lyra ... burning bluer than Rigel, planetless, but encircled by swarms of blazing comets whose gaseous trails scintillated across the blue-black firmament ..." (see graphic) 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.

• Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958), juvenile novel by Robert A. Heinlein. "Vega V" (its real name is unpronounceable by humans) is the home planet of an interstellar "nanny" civilization assigned to covertly mentor humanity when the Three Galaxies Federation becomes aware of our existence. Protagonist Kip Russell has rehabilitated an old space suit that comes in quite handy when he gets involved in an interplanetary kidnapping scheme. He and fellow victim Peewee Reisfeld are abducted first to the Moon, and then to Pluto, where he is seriously injured in their escape. Peewee's companion, the Vegan "Mother Thing," takes Kip to Vega V to be healed, and later to a tribunal in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud (see graphic) where he represents the human race.
• Andromeda: A Space Age Tale (1959), English translation by George Hanna of the Russian language novel by Ivan Efremov. The Earth of the far future is a communist utopia, nonetheless able to send no more than a few infrequent space ships to the nearest star systems, since interstellar travel is limited by the speed of light. One of these near neighbors is Vega. The Earth expedition which reaches the Vega system finds it devoid of life. The Hour of the Bull (1968), the sequel to Andromeda, interestingly confronts its 'communist utopia' with a 'capitalist dystopia' in a structure similar to that subsequently used by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Dispossessed (1974).
• Agent of Vega (1960), fixup written by James H. Schmitz from stories originally appearing in Astounding Science Fiction. In the far future, humans are building the Confederacy of Vega to replace the fallen Empire of Earth. The new empire includes mutated humans as well as non-humans. The enemies of the Confederacy are also a mix of men (not to mention competent women) and aliens in a space opera setting that features Vega's Zone Agents. Conflict between the league and its adversaries involves both physical and telepathic weapons.
• Space Battle in the Vega Sector, Mutants in Action, The Secret of the Time Vault, and The Fortress of the Six Moons (1962), installments 10-13 of the Perry Rhodan series of space-opera pulp novelettes, written by Walter Ernsting as by Clark Darlton, by Karl-Herbert Scheer as by K. H. Scheer, and by Kurt Mahr. In these installments of the long-running English version of the series, Rhodan comes to the aid of the inhabitants of Ferrol, one of Vega's 42 planets, who are enmeshed in a space war between the reptilian Topides and the decadent Arkonides. On Rofus (Vega IX), mutants help Perry gain control of a Topide battleship. His next exploit is to enter the Time Vault and discover the secrets of the methuselan inhabitants of Vega X. The battle against the Topides continues among the six moons of Vega XL, until finally Rhodan tricks his enemies into an "attack" on the Capella system in which they transit directly to the interior of the star itself.
• Demon Princes (1964–1981), series of five novels written by Jack Vance. In Vance's Oikumene universe, Vega is one of the three principal centers of human civilization (together with the Earth and Rigel). It has three uninhabitable inner planets and three habitable abecedarian planets:
  • Padraic, Mona, and Noaille are cinders of scorched stone, baking in the austere glare of the Great White Star. Tidally locked Noaille is notable for its rains of liquid mercury which fall on the dark side and flow to the hot side where they vaporize, to return once again to the dark side.
  • Aloysius. Its early history was dominated by rivalries between religious sects; the effects of the hatred and warfare persist to this day, especially in the countryside. The cities of Pontefract and New Wexford are galactic centers of finance and publishing—where Kirth Gersen runs his magazines Cosmopolis and Extant.
  • Boniface. " oceans are bedeviled by awful storms, the land masses are notable for an extravagant topography: vast plains supine to the force of winds and rain; mountains, caves, crags, chasms; broad rivers flowing from sea to sea."
  • Cuthbert. Called a "Bug-Hunter's Paradise", this humid and unpleasantly marshy world is but sparsely populated.

• This Immortal (1966). novel by Roger Zelazny. In this post-apocalyptic novel, Arts Commissioner Conrad Nomikos—who may or may not be immortal, and who may or may not be a god—assumes the irksome task of escorting a Vegan grandee around the ruins of Earth, which is a popular tourist destination for those among the blue-skinned aliens with a hankering for primal thrills. The masterfully manipulative "immortal" isn't the only one with secrets, however; the Vegan harbors dark secrets of his own, and Earth-liberation rebels are trying to kill him. "Conrad Nomikos ... resembles Herakles—whose labors the plot of he novel covertly replicates—but is certainly both the Hero of a Thousand Faces and the Trickster who mocks the high road of myth..."
• Contact (1985), novel written by Carl Sagan with unacknowledged assistance from Ann Druyan (see also the film Contact below). SETI researchers detect a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence—a transmitter array (compare graphic) in orbit around the star Vega. As signal hunter Ellie Arroway breathlessly proclaims to a colleague over the telephone: "Yes, Vega is smack in the middle of the field of view. And we’re getting what looks like prime number pulses…" After an arduous decoding process, Ellie and her colleagues discover and implement the plans for a wormhole transport device that carries five explorers to the center of the galaxy. There they speak at length with supernal sentiences, but can bring back no proof of the contact—so that when they return home nobody believes their experiences.
• Hyperion (1989) and The Fall of Hyperion (1990), the first two novels in the Hyperion Cantos written by Dan Simmons. Martin Silenus, the Poet of the Hyperion tales, survives tortured formative years growing up in the ambit of the marginally effective Rifkin Atmospheric Protectorate on Heaven’s Gate, "a minor world circling the star Vega ... poisonous world a farcaster connection to Sol System ..." Too late for poor Martin, Heaven's gate is terraformed by the Hegemony of Man into an Edenic garden planet, and kept that way in the face of considerable difficulty thanks to its rich mineral resources—until the collapse of the farcaster network and the fall of the Hegemony. In the apocalypse, "...the worst has happened ... The Ousters are invading the Web. Heaven’s Gate is being destroyed ...". The once beautiful world is reverted by TechnoCore cybrids posing as Ousters into a smoldering slag heap.
• Diaspora (1997), novel by Greg Egan. The Diaspora in the novel consists of a collection of one thousand exact digital copies of the Carter-Zimmerman polis (city state), deployed toward stars in all directions in hopes of improving humankind's understanding of the physics behind an unpredicted gamma ray burst that wiped out most of Earth's inhabitants. Vega is one of the target stars, and a C-Z polis encounters alien life on one of its planets.