Galactic Center

Fictional Versions Of The Galactic Center

densely inhabited

uninhabitable

exploding

a massive black hole

 

The second, third and fourth versions might be successive stages rather than alternative states.

 

"'To begin with, obviously as one goes inward toward a center of population - stellar or otherwise - one's chances of locating a habitable planet begin to rise. They go up pretty sharply toward the tail of the curve, because the stars at the heart of the galaxy seem to average about a light year apart, or only a little more.'"

-James Blish, And All The Stars A Stage (New York, 1971), 12, pp. 173-174.

 

"The nightmare of finding the whole of the center of the Galaxy organized into one vast federation, much older than Earth's, had been troubling the State Department for a long time, at first from purely theoretical considerations - all those heart-stars were much older than those in the spiral arms, and besides, where star density in space is so much higher, interstellar travel does not look quite so insuperable an obstacle as it long had to Earthmen..."

-James Blish, "This Earth of Hours" IN Blish, The Best Of James Blish (New York, 1979), pp. 257-280 AT p. 263.

 

"'You have boarded galactic observation station five, sun two thousand and thirty-six, arm two. The station is an automatic outpost of the Hegemony of Malis, a confederation of solar systems occupying most of the center of this galaxy."

-James Blish, Mission To The Heart Stars (London, 1980), CHAPTER THREE, p. 38.

 

Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire is ruled from the galactic center although a later contributor to Asimov's future history commented that there is a black hole at the exact center.

 

The center explodes as a quasar in Inferno by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle and as a supernova chain reaction in "At The Core" by Larry Niven:

 

"Already the radiation must have killed all life in the Core if there ever had been life there. My instruments on the hull showed radiation like a solar flare."

-Larry Niven, "At The Core" IN Niven, Neutron Star (New York, 1968), pp. 51-72 AT V, p. 67.

 

And, during another mission to the heart stars in another Niven future:

 

"'State astronomers expected a close-packed sphere of millions of suns averaging a quarter to half a light-year apart, with red giant suns predominating. Instead, we find this: the matter in the core forced into a disk that flattens drastically toward the center, with a tremendously powerful source of infrared and radio energy at the axis.'

"'Like your diagram?'

"'Yes, very like this diagram which I find in my data banks, a representation of the structure of the accretion disk around the black hole in Cygnus X-1.'"

-Larry Niven, A World Out Of Time (New York, 1977), CHAPTER TWO, III, pp. 52-53.

 

"Most [stars] were crowded close to the galactic nucleus, with a radiation background that made organic evolution unlikely almost to the point of unthinkability."

-Starfarers, 19, p. 154.