Cosmic Dust

What Poul Anderson in "Pride" (Space Folk, New York, 1989) calls a "brown dwarf" (p. 8) and describes as a "half-star" (p. 1) or "sub-sun" (p. 20), James Blish in Mission To The Heart Stars (London, 1980) calls a "grey ghost" and describes as "a dwarf semi-star." (p. 92)

Anderson describes space travelers exploring new environments, therefore encountering as yet unexplained phenomena like:

" 'Those white clouds blanketing most of the surface [of the brown dwarf]...What are they?'" (Space Folk, p. 16)

When a pilot sets off on a solitary mission, it is entirely to be expected that something will disable her spacecraft. When a second pilot sets off to rescue her and to complete her mission, it is even more to be expected that he will succeed. These are the kinds of things that happen in this kind of story. What is of interest is the nature of the obstacle that she had encountered:

" 'The whitish material in the atmosphere and in the plume she encountered, it's dust...mostly fine silicate particles...cosmic dust that the Solar System condensed out of.' " (p. 23)

This solid material was incorporated into the bodies of smaller planets and the cores of gas giants and was vaporized in the Sun but the heat of the brown dwarf kept it suspended in the lower atmosphere from where it is cast into space whenever the dwarf temporarily ignites.

Thus, the space explorers are encountering that primordial dust from which their planetary system was formed. What more dramatic discovery could they have made two light years from home on the fringe of the Solar System?

"Pride"

Early references to spacemen of different nationalities speaking Swedish, to Stockholm as their capital city and to the Control Authority keeping world peace establish that Poul Anderson's "Pride" (IN Anderson, Space Folk, New York, 1989, pp. 1-28) is set in the same future timeline as his Tau Zero. Otherwise, "Pride" would have been simply an independent story of space exploration. I suppose that any number of stories set in space could be linked into a radial series if their texts were to incorporate such common background references.

The spaceship Anna Lovinda has two purposes:

to test the Bussard drive that might be used for interstellar journeys - and is in Tau Zero;

to investigate "Nemesis, long-unseen companion of Sol..." (p. 5), a "brown dwarf" (intermediate in mass between a star and a planet), and even to land smaller craft on some of its planet-sized satellites.

Nemesis is so called because it is the body whose passage through the Oort cloud disturbs the comets so that some fall towards Sol with catastrophic consequences if they hit the inhabited inner planet. James Blish's unfinished novel King Log features Beta Solis, the long unseen white dwarf companion of Sol, and its planets, including one that is inhabited.

My Anderson agenda has become:

to finish rereading "Pride" because of its connection to Tau Zero and because it is interesting in itself;

to return to rereading the fascinating World Without Stars, which is a companion volume to Tau Zero since both are transgalactic in scope;

to reread "Call Me Joe" because it is a further Anderson work set on Jupiter;

maybe to reread "A Bicycle Built For Brew" and one or two other early works with common backgrounds.

Rereading just became more complicated.

A Dark Planet Of A Dead Star

Poul Anderson, The Enemy Stars, 15.

What could be darker or drearier? Two survivors of a crew of four with a limited food supply land on an airless planet of a dead star to mine for germanium in the hope that they will be able to repair their matter transmitter and return to civilization a hundred light-years away?

The "...iron plains..." (p. 114) of this sterile world contrast sharply with the beautiful environments of colonized planets like, in Anderson's Technic History, Hermes, Avalon and Dennitza although that future history series also presents the lethal surfaces of the rogue planet, Satan, the radioactive Mirkheim and the many barren rocks in the Cloud Universe. Most of the universe is uninhabitable, maybe all of it beyond the Terrestrial atmosphere. I am finding it increasingly difficult to continue rereading this depressing narrative while surrounded by more cheerful texts.

Currently, there is more activity on James Blish Appreciation although page view counts indicate that not everyone who comes here also goes there. Anderson fans might recognize that Blish's description, in The Quincunx Of Time, of the Three Ghosts system could have been written by Anderson. The system comprises:

a red giant star;
a dwarf companion;
a barely substellar gas giant (see the search result for "brown dwarf");
a colonized moon of the gas giant (see Connections With Fiction).

Nemesis

In Poul Anderson's "Pride," (see here) Nemesis (see also Nemesis), a brown dwarf, intermediate between in mass between a star and a planet, is two light years from Sol and has several satellites:

the innermost has life;

the fourth, Earth-sized, might be called Vanadis or Fand by its explorers;

another is Saturn-sized.

Brown dwarfs alternate between igniting like stars and cooling down like planets:

"Suddenly Nemesis exploded." (p. 1)

" - It was mere coincidence. Providence surely has better concerns than our angers. But Nemesis exploded." (p. 4)

Nemesis explodes when men are angry: Pathetic Fallacy? The narrator is not omniscient but identifies as one of us when s/he refers to "...our angers."

The captain of the Anna Lovinda in "Pride" is Erik Telander. The captain of the Leonora Christine in Tau Zero is Lars Telander. These are details that might be missed on a first reading.

Nemesis Explodes

See "Pride," here.

Poul Anderson describes a brown dwarf transitioning from planet to star:

the red disc of Nemesis shudders;
its cloud bands are ripped apart;
its votices shatter;
waves run from the poles;
they meet and recoil at the equator;
surface features vanish;
Nemesis swells visibly, obscuring the stellar background.

Now the moons of a planet have become the planets of a star. How does this affect the life on the innermost satellite and the human beings observing from their spaceship? How many such dramatic stellar and cosmic events does Poul Anderson describe in various works of hard sf? (See Unusual Heavenly Bodies.)

"'...this crew ought to have included a poet. But they have no imagination in Stockholm.'" (p. 2)

However, Poul Anderson does. A poet goes to Proserpina in Harvest The Fire. See:

Poets Of Space
Bard Of A Heroic Age: Physics And Poetry

Cosmic Histories

Olaf Stapledon wrote:

a future history, Last And First Men;

a futuristic perspective on past history, Last Men In London;

an unfinished cosmic history, Nebula Maker;

a completed cosmic history, Star Maker;

a contemporary science fiction (sf) novel linked to Last Men and Star Maker, Odd John;

a short story set in one of the sonic universes created by the experimenting Star Maker, "A World of Sound."

Martians invade Earth. Terrestrials invade Venus and Neptune where they become Venerians and Neptunians, respectively. Neptunians mentally time travel. The Solar System is a different place after the catastrophe that led to the colonization of Neptune. The galactic mind briefly reviews Solar history, then merges into the cosmic mind which glimpses the Star Maker and his ultimate cosmos to which ours is related as a single particle.

Stapledon presents four Wellsian themes, time travel, space travel, Martian invasion and future history, in the first Last Men volume. Further, his fictitious history summarizes the entire human future whereas his predecessor, Wells, had initiated future histories by recounting two centuries including a major turning point. Stapledon, the ultimate sf writer according to Brian Aldiss, and also in my opinion, was at home in places that most people do not know about.

In my experience of reading sf, Stapledon's main successor is Poul Anderson. Readers of more recent cosmic-scale authors will have to tell me whether they think that those authors write as well as Wells, Stapledon or Anderson.

Anderson's much greater body of work includes several future histories. An outline of a cosmic history emerges from his Tau Zero, with significant input from "Pride" (IN Anderson, Space Folk, New York, 1989):

Sol's brown dwarf ("half-star" (p. 1); "sub-sun" (p. 20)) companion, Nemesis, has several large planets, one bearing life;

Nemesis' orbit intersects the Oort cloud, disrupting cometary orbits, thus causing some comets to fall towards the Sun;

cometary impacts kill many Terrestrial species, including dinosaurs, ammonites and Miocene mammals;

homo sapiens becomes dominant on Earth;

there are nuclear wars in the late twentieth century;

entrusted with maintaining world peace, Sweden becomes the single super power for at least two centuries;

Antarctica, the Moon and Mars are colonized;

a Bussard spaceship, Anna Lovinda, makes the four light year round trip to Nemesis, thus establishing that the four light year one way trip to Alpha Centauri is feasible;

Bussard spaceship crews explore and colonize several extrasolar planets;

one spaceship, Leonora Christine, accelerates uncontrollably until the universe contracts and re-expands;

the Leonora Christine crew colonizes a terrestroid planet in the new universe;

their descendants might become the Elder Race of that universe.

Anderson has no Stapledonian observer overseeing cosmic history but does present a continuous narrative from Nemesis in the far past to a human universe in an immeasurable future.

Despite the conceptual link between them, Anderson's Tau Zero and World Without Stars cannot occupy the same timeline because, in the latter novel, the early twenty first century is dominated not by Sweden in the aftermath of nuclear warfare but by the imminent production of the antithanatic. In any case, Tau Zero presents a relativistic universe where one character dismisses the notion of faster than light travel as a fantasy whereas a premise of World Without Stars is the possibility of instantaneous intergalactic jumps. These are two different and independent cosmic novels.

The Brown Dwarf Cycle

See "Pride," here.

Borderline between planetary and stellar mass;

gravitational contraction generates high heat, although not on a stellar scale, in the atmosphere;

much greater heat and pressure at the core;

gravitational collapse initiates thermonuclear reactions;

core temperatures increase;

inner layers expand;

therefore, pressure decreases and thermonuclear reactions cease;

momentum and interior heat maintain expansion for a while;

then collapse recommences.

The cyclical outbursts do not affect the life on Nemesis' innermost satellite which has had gigayears to adapt.

Exploration of Nemesis
An unmanned probe, Gertrud, entered the system and launched robot investigators, including Osa which went into close polar orbit around Nemesis and transmitted data to Gertrud until its transmitter began to fail although sporadic, distorted transmissions continued, showing that Osa was still collecting data. Later, the spaceship, Anna Lovinda, arrived and docked with Gertrud. When Nemesis expanded, gaseous resistance forced Osa lower and into an unstable orbit. A pilot from Anna Lovinda must recover Osa before it becomes a meteorite. Captain Telander asks why the inner probe is nicknamed "Osa" but does not get an answer.

(New post on Religion and Philosophy: here.)