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Science fiction and the death of the sun
- Archelaos 3y ago> During the Age of Enlightenment ... as the scientific method replaced religion as the explanation for physical phenomena This happended more than 2,000 years earlier. The author seems to miss basic knowledge in the history of philosophy and science.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoI’ll bite. What are you referring to?
- whythre 3y agoAristotle, perhaps?
- Supermancho 3y ago> the predominant scientific belief was that the universe and the bodies within it were endless From the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space Zeng Heng, who codified a long held belief that most certainly predated 0 AD
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoNobody claimed there was no science. Just that there was no scientific method, nor the supremacy of scientific over religious explanations for the natural world.
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y agoThis is a case of “Whig History” that refuses to die
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoThe scientific method didn’t exist before the Enlightenment. We had tolerant societies before the present. But the notion that science should trump religion is modern. That doesn’t imply a glorious present. Just a qualitatively different one from any period before the modern era.
- bandrami 3y agoI'd rather say that the distinction between disciplines of learning is an anachronism before the early modern era (and even through much of it). "Philosophy" included what we now call medicine, natural science, theology, astronomy, astrology, and even music theory. There wasn't a question of "trumping" in the sense that they weren't thought of as different things.
- Archelaos 3y agoThis is primarily a terminological issue, what is used as a general term: "Philosophy", "natural philosophy", "Science and scholarship" (the German "Wissenschaft" always means both together -- "science" in particular is "Naturwissenschaft"). A discipline emerges, when a specific body of systematic knowledge becomes so specific that it typically requires specific expert knowledge and training (polymaths aside). In the European history of ideas, the first such body of knowledge was mathematics, but many others evolved already in Antiquity and were refined during the Middle Ages, such as astronomy, medicine, botanics, ... By the way: music theory in this times was the study of harmonic intervals and predominantly mathematics. And the conflict between religion and science avant la lettre was as old as all of this (see Sokrates or Abelard to mention just the two most famous from Antiquity and the Middle Ages, respectively). What changed gradually in the 17th and then had a break through in the 18th century was the adoption of the experimental method. This was not completely new, but from then on become the standard that makrs modern science.
- kuchenbecker 3y agoOne big realization I had how sophisticated the ancient world is, the Antithikara Mechanism. Device built by ancient greeks in 200BC using thousands of years of astronomical learning to build the first KNOWN Analog Computer and devices of similar sophistication are not seen until the late middle ages / early renaissance.
- nradov 3y agoSome ancient societies were quite skilled and sophisticated in certain areas. But as far as we can determine they didn't have the scientific method as we understand it today.
- Animats 3y ago> "Now-disgraced sci-fi patriarch John W. Campbell..." What did he do?
- cwillu 3y ago“An increasingly strong interest in pseudoscience later alienated Campbell from Asimov.[4] In the 1960s, Campbell's controversial essays supporting segregation, and other remarks and writings surrounding slavery and race, served to distance him from many in the science fiction community.”
- User23 3y ago[flagged]
- KittenInABox 3y agoI don't believe Samuel Delany is an open NAMBLA member. He has expressed support for NAMBLA in 2004, and in 2014 admitted to reading a newsletter from them but claims not to have kept up with them for 20 years. These statements are now a decade and two decades old & I don't know what to make of him now these days. If you have more recent info, please let me know. [Also: alleged pedophile? who alleged him of pedophilia? seriously asking]
- cratermoon 3y ago"In 1949, Campbell worked closely with L. Ron Hubbard on the techniques that Hubbard later turned into Dianetics. When Hubbard's therapy failed to find support from the medical community, Campbell published the earliest forms of Dianetics in Astounding." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell#Views https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell#Views
- KittenInABox 3y agoJohn W. Campbell did one of those contrarian intellectual who knee jerked too hard. He advocated that slavery had good sides and that it should've been kept as an institution because the civil war was worse than slavery. Also that slavery was a more natural way of society. Also that the relation of smoking to lung cancer was esoteric (he loved a good cig). Oh and that racial segregation should be maintained because of the inferiority of negroes. You know this kind of personality.
- Apocryphon 3y ago> For while the dying-earth genre came to an end in the 1940s uhh... Dying Earth is a fantasy series by the American author Jack Vance, comprising four books originally published from 1950 to 1984. The Book of the New Sun (1980–1983, 1987) is a four-volume science fantasy novel[2] written by the American author Gene Wolfe.
- megiddo 3y agoStunning that Vance isn't mentioned. I can't imagine how he's overlooked in this article.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoLikewise. I feel that Jack Vance's Dying Earth series isn't as well known as it should be considering the huge influence it had on the invention of D&D (there's names of spells copied directly from it).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- svachalek 3y agoI think these are by far the most popular works today associated with the "dying earth" genre? Interesting that the article ignores them. But I never knew how pre-fusion astrophysics inspired this kind of story, which was fascinating. I've read both series within the past few years and they're still worth a a read. Vance's works inspired lots about D&D (including the older "Vancian" spell casting system) and have a lot of humor. The Book of the New Sun is a challenging read, written by an unreliable narrator. They're kind of interesting if you just take them at face value but to really appreciate them you have to go down the rabbit hole of what's really happening here.
- shagie 3y agoAnother entry in the 1950s to 1980s time frame: The Songs of Distant Earth by Clarke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songs_of_Distant_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songs_of_Distant_Earth > The Songs of Distant Earth is a 1986 science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke, based upon his 1958 short story of the same title. He stated that it was his favourite of all his novels. Clarke also wrote a short step outline with the same title, published in Omni magazine and anthologised in The Sentinel in 1983. > The novel tells of a utopian human colony in the far future that is visited by travellers from a doomed Earth, as the Sun has gone nova. The Songs of Distant Earth explores apocalyptic, atheistic, and utopian ideas, as well as the effects of long-term interstellar travel and extra-terrestrial life. The story is set in the 39th century and follows the journey of a spaceship called the Magellan as it carries a group of colonists to a distant planet, Thalassa. Thalassa is one of the few habitable planets discovered by Earth’s automated spacecraft, and it becomes a refuge for humanity facing the impending destruction of Earth due to a massive solar flare.
- radicaldreamer 3y agoLiu Cixin has a novella about moving the earth to avoid a supernova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wandering_Earth_(novella) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wandering_Earth_(novella)
- melagonster 3y agoFor more information, These products are crazy popular in China. >It was also adapted into a 2019 film of the same name and its sequel, and a 2021 graphic novel. Main topic is the protagonist can make the important decision: sacrifice half of human to move earth. Other people were too hypocritical and supid to do this.
- jandrese 3y ago[flagged]
- foobiekr 3y agoThe Remembrance of Earth's Past series as a whole is also pretty terrible. Interesting concepts here and there, awful characters and writing, terrible convenient plot elements.
- RaoulP 3y agoI never realised until now that The Wandering Earth and The Three Body Problem are written by the same author.
- StefanBatory 3y agoHis books feel quite uncomfortable to me. They read like endorsement of CCP authoritarian govt, with how often the themes are "Leaders are flawless, don't dare to even criticise them" (last wallfacer in Three Body Problem)
- firebaze 3y agoCan you name other examples? I didn't have that impression yet, and the wallfacer example strikes me as a bad one (in the given context, it is reasonable to give the wallfacers full authority, would probably be the same even if the author was a Texan Redneck)
- sircastor 3y agoI recall back in 7th grade I mapped out a sci-fi story about people having to abandon the Earth after it suddenly transitioned into its red giant phase. I didn’t ever get to writing the story, but I was captivated by the concept of the need for sudden evacuation.
- xjay 3y agoIn some 1990s sci-fi series, an alien race played the long game by directing some (invisible) energy beam at the sun, accelerating its transition into becoming a red giant, a process which would have otherwise taken billions of years.
- Mtinie 3y agoWhich only made sense if you wanted to conquer a frozen, iron/oxygem-heavy planet[0]. Or, I guess, if you are a Krytonian. ——- [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_el... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptonian https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptonian
- RaoulP 3y agoAround the same age, I remember first hearing about the expanse of the sun, and being afraid of experiencing it.
- Reason077 3y agoDanny Boyle and Alex Garland's 2007 film Sunshine is another great example of this genre. Rather than abandoning a frozen earth due to the dying sun, they send a mission to deliver a bomb into it to "restart" it. A real all-star cast featuring not only a young Cillian Murphy, but a young Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Hiroyuki Sanada, Benedict Wong, Cliff Curtis, and Rose Byrne! Highly recommended, despite never satisfactorily explaining why they require a manned spacecraft to do the job rather than sending a robotic drone ship. Seems to me that adding humans to the mix greatly increased the complexity and risk of the mission.
- hackable_sand 3y agoI thought they did explain why they needed humans, but I bet we can hand-wave that away with some radiation technobabble.
- throwup238 3y agoEvent Horizon is a great movie to watch after Sunshine
- 0x38B 3y agoThese two articles in American Cinematographer (1 and 2) give some interesting background on the movie; concerning the ship they write: > When it first appears onscreen, the Event Horizon craft itself resembles a giant crucifix hovering over the surface of Neptune. "The spaceship was built on a cruciform, like all cathedrals are," Anderson explains. "We began the design process by literally scanning [photos of] the Notre-Dame Cathedral into the computer and then constructing the Event Horizon out of those Gothic elements. For example, the big thruster engines are an adaptation of the Notre Dame towers, repositioned on their sides. A lot of the iron and steel work of the superstructure is based on the cathedral's stained-glass windows. The ship also has a lot of triptych windows and big recessed crosses. > "When Adrian and I first sat down, we said, 'Let's do something completely different,"' says Anderson. "Since we were going into outer space, I felt we had to have a really strong design concept; otherwise Event Horizon would have ended up looking like [a bunch of] other movies cobbled together. We spent a lot of time coming up with a design concept, which we called 'techno-Medieval.' When the lights are on, everything looks very technological and very spaceship-like. But when the lights go off and the haunting begins, you start looking at the shapes, and the architecture is actually very medieval. We extended that techno-Medieval design idea into as many aspects of the picture's look as possible, without rubbing the audience's nose in it." 1: https://theasc.com/articles/unearthly-terrors-event-horizon https://theasc.com/articles/unearthly-terrors-event-horizon 2: https://theasc.com/articles/event-horizon-scare-tactics https://theasc.com/articles/event-horizon-scare-tactics
- gwern 3y agoI never realized I had misread _The Time Machine_ or _The Magician's Nephew_ as being about red giants, rather than heat-death! Goes to show how easy it is to seriously misunderstand aspects of 'science fiction' when the science changes... OP missed a good historical example before Thompson, however: Isaac Newton himself had a cosmology with the Sun being renewed by periodic comet impacts. Unfortunately, we would all die when the Sun flared up after impact, but at least aliens on other planets would get a renewed Sun: https://gwern.net/newton https://gwern.net/newton
- Vecr 3y agoThe The Magician's Nephew is about red giants, or at least the expanding phase of a star like the sun. It's from the 1950s, and C. S. Lewis wrote science fiction earlier.
- gwern 3y agoNo, I think OP makes a good case that Lewis did not mean an expanding red giant in _Magician's Nephew_, even if he could have used the most recent science at the time to choose to do so: "“So big, so red, and so cold.” “It has always been so,” said Jadis. “At least, for hundreds of thousands of years. Have you a different sort of sun in your world?”" A red giant expanding to the point of taking up much of the sky would not be 'cold', nor would it 'always been so...for hundreds of thousands of years'. (It would be hot, the world heating up at that close an approach, and the expansion quite visible on the order of millions of years rather than totally static and unchanging.) That only is consistent with the cooled-down prior version.
- Vecr 3y agoHow would it appear large in the sky though? Gravitational waves are out, maybe solar wind and light pressure were supposed to be keeping the planet orbiting higher? Or is the point that the planet was always close, but only cooled down enough for life after the star started cooling down?
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- andrewflnr 3y agoThis hammered home for me how incredibly recent are a lot of the scientific discoveries we take utterly for granted. Even before nuclear energy, atoms themselves were only confirmed to exist in the 20th century. Everyone knows about plate tectonics, but that was confirmed in the 60s or something.
- RaoulP 3y agoAfter this morning's earthquake I was thinking how, without any theory of plate tectonics (or previous theories, if any), an earthquake must truly feel like the wrath of god. I wonder if it's been the seed for any myths.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoMaybe it wasn’t actually trumpets that brought down the walls of Jericho after all
- adrian_b 3y agoI consider the date when the existence of the atoms has been confirmed to be 1865, when Johann Josef Loschmidt has determined for the first time the mass of some atoms. (i.e. he has determined the value of what is now called the constant of Avogadro, which is proportional to the inverse of the mass of an atom; there are various related quantities where knowing one determines all the others, including the constant of Avogadro and the concentration of molecules in a gas at standard pressure and temperature; knowing the mass of any molecule or atom allows the computation of the masses of all other atoms and molecules, using the chemical formulas) Using the mass of an atom, various other atomic quantities could be computed immediately, e.g. George Johnstone Stoney has computed in 1874 the value of the elementary electric charge, based on the results of Loschmidt. The work of Loschmidt has also allowed James Clerk Maxwell to propose in 1873 a system of fundamental units for the physical quantities which was based only on reproducible atomic properties, instead of unique artifacts like the platinum standard meter and the platinum standard kilogram. (However Maxwell's system was not yet practical at that time, because the accuracy with which the atomic masses were known was too low in comparison with the precision of the weight scales.) Before Loschmidt, the atoms were indeed just a hypothetical construct that could explain some properties of the chemical reactions and of the gases, but nothing could be said about them quantitatively. After Loschmidt, the atoms became physical objects with precisely known properties, e.g. you could count how many atoms are in a pebble that you hold in your hand. By the start of the 20th century, more than a human generation had passed since the last time when scientists wondered whether atoms really exist. At that time already atom beams were routinely manipulated with electric and magnetic fields and unexpected atomic properties like radioactivity and transmutation were already known.
- MrIrrelevant 3y ago[flagged]
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- jrmg 3y agoOlaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, from 1930, seems to fit this genre too. It gets a bit outlandish with telepathy, but it’s ambitious novel telling of humanity’s ebbing and flowing, evolving a lot along the way, from ‘present day’ to the far, far future when the solar system is engulfed by a supernovaing sun. Considering its ambition, it reads surprisingly well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men
- Salmoneo 3y agoAnother entry in the dying Earth/Sun or Last Civilization approach is The Phoenix in Obsidian aka The Silver Warriors from 1970 by the oft forgotten but quite seminal Micheal Moorcock of Elric fame, but He wrote way more than that. Set in a frozen Earth and with a Sun that is just a white dwarf. The last surviving sea is so salty and dense is gelatinous and ship actually "flap" over it. It's part of the John Daker/Ereköse series, and in turn part of the bigger inter-books Moorcokian Multiverse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moorcock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moorcock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_in_Obsidian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_in_Obsidian
- someone7x 3y agoThe Ice Schooner as well, but sadly no wikipedia page for it. > In this far-future adventure, Captain Arflane leads his crew of the schooner Ice Spirit across the endless seas of ice covering Earth. To any survivors of this brave expedition will go the legendary riches buried beneath the ancient ice . . . the once-great city of New York! https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Ice_Schooner.html?id=V-sAEKGFPU0C https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Ice_Schooner.html?i...
- perilunar 3y agoI've never really understood the pessimism of the dying sun trope in SF. If humans are still around in billions of years then our descendants will either have spread throughout the galaxy, or will have the technology to either tweak the Sun to not go nova, or to move the Earth out of harm's way. Seems like a major failure of the imagination. (Also: the idea that we need to find other planets to live on if the Sun goes nova or if we screw up the Earth is another one. We'll probably be living in millions of large space colonies, not on planets.)
- macintux 3y agoAs the article elaborates, for many years the dying sun was expected to be much, much sooner than that.
- bccdee 3y agoThat's awfully optimistic. For one, why would we colonize the galaxy? We probably can't beat lightspeed. It'll take generations to get anywhere, plus a huge upfront investment, and for what? We can't send resources back, so it is not an investment. Terraforming would be extremely challenging, extremely slow, and would (if we were very, very lucky) still just get us a worse version of Earth. It just isn't a rational choice. "Tweaking the sun" is probably unfeasible. We could crash our entire planet into the sun and it'd have little effect. The sun is really really really big and we are really really really small. Similarly, adjusting Earth's orbit would require a colossal amount of energy and reaction mass which we just don't have, and probably never will. There's no reason to assume that humanity will inevitably advance through some exponential techno-apotheosis such that we'll eventually be able to do anything we want. Instead, it's much more sensible to assume technological growth will follow a sigmoid curve. Technological advancement has a ceiling determined by our resources and abilities, and that ceiling is almost certainly too low to accommodate a galactic civilization of stellar engineers.
- perilunar 3y ago> why would we colonize the galaxy? To explore. Yes, it may take generations to get anywhere, and no, we probably won't be sending resources back. > Terraforming would be extremely challenging Yes. Terraforming is a bad idea. Much better to mine asteroids and build large habitats in orbit. When it gets too crowded, move to the next star. No need to terraform planets to spread out into the galaxy. > "Tweaking the sun" is probably unfeasible We've got millions of years to work out how. I doubt it would be something as crude as crashing planets into it. > Similarly, adjusting Earth's orbit would require a colossal amount of energy and reaction mass Yes, but you'd have a colossal amount of time to move it. Light sails maybe — they use energy/mass from the sun itself. > Technological advancement has a ceiling determined by our resources and abilities, and that ceiling is almost certainly too low to accommodate a galactic civilization of stellar engineers. I don't know how you can know that. It's only a couple of hundred years since the scientific revolution — how can you possibly know what the limits will be over millions or billions of years?
- clarionbell 3y agoNew Sun by Gene Wolfe is a great example of that genre. Also of the unreliable narrator, as the protagonist is writing his autobiography, is not well educated and suffers from rather interesting neurological divergence (he forgets nothing). All in all, it makes for a very good series. Especially once you realize that you are reading about sci-fi world, as written about by a person living in essentially ancient society.
- ignoreusernames 3y agoGreat series. If I'm not mistaken, there's an additional layer to the unreliable narrator part because the book is supposed to be a translation of that biography. So, when certain words are used, the reader knows that they don't necessarily represent the literal meaning and it's only an approximation for the actual thing in the book universe (for example, a "horse" is not actually a "horse" as we know it). It certainly helped me digest the more outlandish ideas.
- autarch 3y ago> Also of the unreliable narrator, as the protagonist is writing his autobiography, is not well educated and suffers from rather interesting neurological divergence (he forgets nothing). And also he's a pretty terrible person trying to make himself (unsuccessfully) sound a bit less terrible.
- clarionbell 3y agoAppropriate nickname given what he does with previous Autarchs brain.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mdale 3y agoReally enjoyed this journey. Could have extended into more modern tropes of singularity and mastery of energy the sun provides finding it's way into modern sci-fi.
- nunodonato 3y agoScience compels us to explode the sun
- PoignardAzur 3y agoOr wait for a few billion years. As an aside, I took a while to roll with the narrative about the heat death of the universe in Outer Wilds. It's too sudden: you go from a healthy yellow sun to a red star in the blink of an eye. Even if you accept that timeframes are accelerated in this game, same reason the planets are smaller, it should still happen in a timespan comparable to the sun's entire lifespan, not a single event. Still, best game, would erase my memory to play again.
- nunodonato 3y agoglad to see that someone picked up the reference ::)
- whoisstan 3y agoThe Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is magnificent. Set in a contemporary setting, the sun and stars are replaced by projection shield that simulates them, and as the topic suggests it’s because the sun has died, but who did it??? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/910863 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/910863
- megablast 3y agoMagnificent?? Uh, no.
- mannykannot 3y ago"For another thing, if the light came from incandescence, what on earth was a pulsar? Surely a star couldn’t be alternately collapsing and un-collapsing." This is odd, as pulsars were not discovered until 1967, and not hypothesized prior to their discovery. Variable stars have been known to science of since 1638, and an explanation for one type, eclipsing binaries, had been established by 1784.
- gwenckatz 3y agoApologies for this error--I've gone back and verified that you are correct, Eddington was indeed talking about variable stars generally, not pulsars specifically. Eddington brings up this issue in "The Internal Constitution of the Stars" (1920), and discusses at length why the eclipse theory doesn't hold up: "There are certain stars, known as Cepheid variables, which undergo a regular fluctuation of light of a characteristic kind, generally with a period of a few days. This light change is not due to eclipse. Moreover, the color quality of the light changes between maximum and minimum, evidently pointing to a periodic change in the physical condition of the star. Although these objects were formerly thought to be double stars, it now seems clear that this was a misinterpretation of the spectroscopic evidence. There is in fact no room for the hypothetical companion star; the orbit is so small that we should have to place it inside the principal star. Everything points to the period of the light pulsation being something intrinsic in the star; and the hypothesis advocated by Shapley, that it represents a mechanical pulsation of the star, seems to be the most plausible. I have already mentioned that the observed period does in fact agree with the calculated period of mechanical pulsation, so that the pulsation explanation survives one fairly stringent test. But whatever the cause of the variability, whether pulsation or rotation, provided only that it is intrinsic in the star, and not forced from outside, the density must be the leading factor in determining the period. If the star is contracting so that its density changes appreciably, the period can not remain constant. Now, on the contraction hypothesis the change of density must amount to at least 1 percent. in 40 years. (I give the figures for 8 Cephei, the best-known variable of this class.) The corresponding change of period should be very easily detectable. For 8 Cephei the period ought to decrease 40 seconds annually." You can find the article at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/6491 https://www.jstor.org/stable/6491
- weinzierl 3y agoSince it fits the topic and my efforts to find this story have been unsuccessful for years, I'll give it a try: I am looking for a short story about an astronaut conducting radiation measurements on the dark side of the moon (or maybe mars). The astronaut ponders the strange measurement results when it dawns at him that the sun must have gone supernova and earth probably scorched. He returns to earth as the last living human, but discovers that other lifeforms (I believe to remember it was about a butterfly) seem to have survived and despite the end of humanity, life was going to continue. I read this story about 30 years ago in an anthology of short stories which my future wife brought from our local library. Unfortunately, I don't remember any of the other stories and authors, but I believe they were all well known names and not obscure pulp fiction authors. Today it strikes me, how naïve the thought was, that libraries and books were for eternity and that everything I'd read would be effortlessly available for me in the library to read again when ever I wanted.
- fsiefken 3y agoSo is the old catalogue of the library perhaps available? Perhaps there is a dos computer or disk still available or someone who knows? Perhaps also ask in https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/ https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/
- PopAlongKid 3y agoPlot sounds similar to Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven from the 1970s, but the protagonist is on the night side of Earth, not an astronaut on the moon.
- paleotrope 3y agoI was the same way when I was young, then I found out about books going out of print and then later, library book sales, and then even later, about librarians actively culling their book collections to make room for newer books.
- ranger207 3y agoTo add yet another entry into the genre is Asimov's _The Gods Themselves_, where humanity exchanges energy between themselves and a parallel universe with different physical laws, only to discover those physical laws are leaking over and will result in the destruction of the Sun. The middle section is the story of the aliens in the parallel universe and is an interesting look at a three-sex species, and it makes me wonder how Asimov would interpret modern LGBTQ issues.
- atombender 3y agoYou can't have an article about the dying Earth genre and not mention The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. The novel is deep and mysterious, involving — among many other things — a far-future Earth in which aliens have placed a black hole inside the sun. It's one of those books whose true meaning and cryptic clues are mined endlessly on mailing lists, forums, and podcasts (there are at least four that cover this book).