Black holes in fiction

Spatial anomalies in fiction
Black holes in fiction • Portable hole • Teleportation in fiction • Wormholes in fiction • Stargate • Warp drive • Hyperspace • Time travel in fiction
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Black holes, objects whose gravity is so strong that nothing—including light—can escape them, have been depicted in fiction since at least the pulp era of science fiction, before the term black hole was coined.

Early depictions

The general concept of black holes, objects whose gravity is so strong that nothing—including light—can escape them, was first proposed by John Michell in 1783 and developed further in the framework of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916.^[2][3][4][5] Serious scientific attention remained relatively limited until the 1960s, the same decade the term black hole was coined,^[a] though objects with the general characteristics of black holes had made appearances in fiction decades earlier during the pulp era of science fiction.^{[2][3][4][5][6]} Examples of this include E. E. Smith's 1928 novel The Skylark of Space with its "black sun", Frank K. Kelly [Wikidata]'s 1935 short story "Starship Invincible" with its "Hole in Space", and Nat Schachner's 1938 short story "Negative Space"—all of which portray the black holes avant la lettre as hazards to spacefarers.^[2][3] Later works that nevertheless predate the adoption of the current terminology include Fred Saberhagen's 1965 short story "Masque of the Red Shift" with its "hypermass" and the 1967 Star Trek episode "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" with its "black star".^[4][6]

Time dilation

Once black holes gained mainstream popularity, many of the early works featuring black holes focused on the concept of gravitational time dilation, whereby time passes more slowly closer to a black hole due to the effects of general relativity.^[3][5] One consequence of this is that the process of crossing the event horizon appears to an outside observer to take an infinite amount of time.^[4][7] In Poul Anderson's 1968 short story "Kyrie", a telepathic scream from a being falling into a black hole thus becomes drawn out for eternity.^[4][7][8] Similarly, a spaceship appears forever immovable at the event horizon in Brian Aldiss's 1976 short story "The Dark Soul of the Night",^[3][7] and in Frederik Pohl's 1977 novel Gateway, an astronaut is wracked with survivor's guilt over the deaths of his companions during an encounter with a black hole, compounded by the process appearing to still be ongoing.^[4][7] Later sequels in Pohl's Heechee Saga, from the 1980 novel Beyond the Blue Event Horizon onward, portray time dilation being exploited by aliens who reside near a black hole to experience the passage of time more slowly than the rest of the universe;^[2][4][5][9] other aliens do likewise in David Brin's 1984 short story "The Crystal Spheres" while waiting for the universe to be more filled with life, and in Alastair Reynolds's 2000 novel Revelation Space, they do it to hide.^[10] In Bill Johnson's 1982 short story "Meet Me at Apogee", travel to various levels of time dilation is commercialized, used by people with incurable diseases among others.^[10] In the 2014 film Interstellar, a planet orbits a black hole so closely that it experiences time dilation with a factor of approximately 60,000 relative to Earth.^[6][11]

Space travel

Black holes have also been portrayed as ways to travel through space.^{[5][7][12][13]} In particular, they often serve as a means to achieve faster-than-light travel.^{[3][5][7][13]} The proposed mechanism involves travelling through the singularity at the center of a black hole and emerging at some other, perhaps very distant, place in the universe.^[5][7] More exotically, the point of emergence is occasionally portrayed as another point in time—thus enabling time travel—or even an entirely different universe.^[1][5][14] To explain why the immense gravitational field of the black hole does not crush the travellers and their vessels, the special theorized properties of rotating black holes are sometimes invoked by authors;^[5][7] astrophysicists Steven D. Bloom and Andrew May argue that the strong tidal forces would nevertheless invariably be fatal, May pointing specifically to spaghettification.^[1][14] According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, early stories employing black holes for this purpose tended to use alternative terminology to obfuscate the underlying issues.^[5] Thus, Joe Haldeman's 1974 fix-up novel The Forever War, where a network of black holes is used for interstellar warfare, calls them "collapsars", while George R. R. Martin's 1972 short story "The Second Kind of Loneliness" has a "nullspace vortex".^[5][10][12]

Speculation that black holes might be connected to their hypothetical opposites, white holes, soon followed—the resulting arrangement being known as a wormhole.^{[2][3][15][16]} Wormholes were appealing to writers due to their relative theoretical plausibility as a means of faster-than-light travel,^[7] and they were further popularized by speculative works of non-fiction such as Adrian Berry's 1977 book The Iron Sun: Crossing the Universe Through Black Holes.^[3][5] Black holes and associated wormholes thus quickly became commonplace in fiction; according to science fiction scholar Brian Stableford, writing in the 2006 work Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia, "wormholes became the most fashionable mode of interstellar travel in the last decades of the twentieth century".^[3][5] Ian Wallace's 1979 novel Heller's Leap is a murder mystery involving a journey through a black hole.^[5][17] Joan D. Vinge's 1980 novel The Snow Queen is set on a circumbinary planet where a black hole between the binary stars serves as the gateway between the system and the outside world,^[5][12][18] while Paul Preuss's 1980 novel The Gates of Heaven and its 1981 follow-up Re-Entry feature black holes that are used for travel through both space and time.^[3][4][19] The entire Earth is transported through a wormhole in Roger MacBride Allen's 1990 novel The Ring of Charon.^[3][5] Travel between universes is depicted in Pohl and Jack Williamson's 1991 novel The Singers of Time,^[5] the concept having earlier made a more fanciful appearance in the 1975 film The Giant Spider Invasion, where the spiders of the title arrive at Earth through a black hole.^[4][20]

Energy source

Other uses of black holes have been conceived, one being as a source of energy as in Gregory Benford's 1986 short story "As Big As the Ritz".^[2][3][4]

Micro black holes

Micro black holes were first depicted in Larry Niven's 1974 short story "The Hole Man", and were later used as a means of powering spaceship propulsion in the 1975 novel Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke and a way to provide an artificial gravity of sorts in Charles Sheffield's novel Proteus Unbound from 1989.^[2][3][5] Conversely, an enormous yet low-density black hole appears in Barry N. Malzberg's 1975 novel Galaxies.^[12]

Interior

Black holes have been depicted with varying degrees of accuracy to the scientific understanding of them. Because what lies beyond the event horizon is unknown and by definition unobservable from outside, authors have been free to employ artistic license when depicting the interiors of black holes.^[5][11][13] The 1979 Disney film The Black Hole features a completely fictionalized version of a black hole, both with regard to its outside and its inside.^[3][4][11]

Sentient

Anthropomorphized, thinking black holes are seen in a handful of works including Benford's 2000 novel Eater.^[2][13]

See also

• Black hole starship
• Stars in fiction
• Supernovae in fiction

Notes

References

Further reading

• Bly, Robert W. (2005). "Black Holes". The Science in Science Fiction: 83 SF Predictions That Became Scientific Reality. Consulting Editor: James Gunn. BenBella Books. pp. 67–74. ISBN 978-1-932100-48-8.