Oolite Bulletins

Wildeblood wrote: ↑Tue Oct 22, 2024 11:05 pm

[...] I asked for examples of stories with black holes performing some function between the narrative extremes of being just a passing reference and being a main focus of the protagonist's actions. I'm asking for stories with gratuitous inclusion of black holes, that could be easily written out, but not so easily as just a passing reference that could be written out with one paragraph. IOW, stories from the time when black holes were shiny and new and authors were shoe-horning them in to stories where they didn't need to be.

1. is a black hole.
2. is not the main story.
3. is more than just a mention.

Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda:
1. Starts near a black hole where Andromeda spent 300 years close to the event horizon
2. Several (3-4?) episodes touch a black hole in their story line, but the main story of the series is not "black hole bound"
3. I can remember two of them presented:
- first one (in Hephaistos IV system) where the story starts, Andromeda is pulled from close to the event horizon, and the crew returns some episodes later, to use it for some back-in-time action (assisted by the black hole presence)
- second one that presents herself as an avatar (we also have other celestial bodies avatars; a main character is a star avatar) in a sort of a dream Andromeda's captain is having

not sure if this is a black hole but it seems to work in a simmilar way.
a Hawking M-Sink from Peter F Hamiltons Void Trilogy. The Cat fires one at Hanko ( a planet ) and it consumes the planet entirely slowly at first by memory it took about 48Hrs?

Have another one - in 2010 Odyssey 2 (novel by Arthur C. Clarke 1982, filmed 1984) alien monoliths in Jupiter's atmosphere start to multiply, apparently by converting atmospheric gases into solid monolith material, forming an expanding black spot which eventually implodes as a short-lived black hole, starting a fusion reaction that will turn Jupiter into a small star for the next thousand years or so. This is a major plot element but the story is more about the voyage and trying to communicate with the aliens and figure things out, later trying to survive the explosion, rather than the black spot and hole itself, which appears fairly late in the book/film and is only a black hole for a few seconds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%3A_Odyssey_Two

A weird idea I had a couple of years ago - this could have happened in the last Harry Potter book, when the coins in the Lestrange vault started to multiply thanks to the "gemino" spell. Someone did the sums for me, it turns out that regardless of the starting mass of the object being doubled you get a singularity after approximately a hundred doublings, all other things being equal. I weaponised the spell in one of my fanfic stories, and later added the "oops, we destroyed the Earth" ending as an omake at the end of the story.

ffutures wrote: ↑Tue Nov 12, 2024 12:58 am

Have another one - in 2010 Odyssey 2 (novel by Arthur C. Clarke 1982, filmed 1984) alien monoliths in Jupiter's atmosphere start to multiply, apparently by converting atmospheric gases into solid monolith material, forming an expanding black spot which eventually implodes as a short-lived black hole, starting a fusion reaction that will turn Jupiter into a small star for the next thousand years or so. This is a major plot element but the story is more about the voyage and trying to communicate with the aliens and figure things out, later trying to survive the explosion, rather than the black spot and hole itself, which appears fairly late in the book/film and is only a black hole for a few seconds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%3A_Odyssey_Two

Excellent, since it was also one of Sir Arthur's novels that inspired the question:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Earth

Imperial Earth is a science fiction novel by British writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke, published in 1975 by Gollancz Books. The plot follows the protagonist, Duncan Makenzie, on a trip to Earth from his home on Titan, in large part as a diplomatic visit to the U.S. for its quincentennial in 2276, but also to have a clone of himself produced. The book was published in time for the U.S. bicentennial in 1976.

The spaceship Makenzie travels to Earth aboard is powered by an "asymptotic drive", a device which uses the gravitational attraction of a microscopic black hole to accelerate any random fuel to near light speed, and expel it rearwards. In one chapter, Makenzie and a few others go down to the engine room to look through a microscope, embedded in the rocket nozzle, at the black hole.

Reading this chapter, I assumed it was a Chekov's rifle ("If there's a rifle hanging over the fireplace in chapter one, someone gets shot in chapter three.") and the story would develop with "What could possibly go wrong?" But in fact, it's never mentioned again.

ffutures wrote: ↑Tue Nov 12, 2024 12:58 am

and later added the "oops, we destroyed the Earth" ending as an omake at the end of the story.

Is that a .. Japanese manga ?? term?

RockDoctor wrote: ↑Wed Nov 20, 2024 8:37 am

ffutures wrote: ↑Tue Nov 12, 2024 12:58 am

and later added the "oops, we destroyed the Earth" ending as an omake at the end of the story.

Is that a .. Japanese manga ?? term?

I think so - in fanfic it's used for alternative ideas/plotlines/outtakes that weren't actually used in the story but might amuse the readers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omake