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The notion that there might be inhabited extrasolar planets can be traced at least as far back as Giordano Bruno who, in his De l'infinito, universo e mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, 1584), declared that "There are then innumerable suns, and an infinite number of earths revolve around those suns, [These worlds are inhabited] if not exactly as our own, and if not more nobly, at least no less inhabited and no less nobly." Allusions to inhabitants of other stars' planetary systems remained rare in literature for many centuries thereafter. One of these is found in Voltaire's Micromégas (1752), which features a traveller from Sirius.
As science fiction became established in the early 20th century, destinations such as the Moon, Mars, Venus and other bodies within the Solar System began to seem stale. Authors invoked a variety of mechanisms for superluminal travel and placed their stories on worlds in planetary systems around other stars, a shift that gave them the freedom to construct exotic fictional planets and themes. This tendency became predominant once the exploration of the Solar System was complete enough to conclusively demonstrate the unlikelihood of any highly developed form of extraterrestrial life there.
Although some of the stars named in works of science fiction are purely imaginary, many authors and artists have preferred to use the names of real stars that are well known to astronomers, either because they are notably bright in the sky or because they are relatively close to Earth.
Despite the increasing tempo of discovery of extrasolar planets in the galactic vicinity of the Sun, the prospects for the realization of imagined habitable worlds around the brightest stars are not good. Assuming that the Earth is typical, these stars are poor candidates to host planets supporting advanced life. The Solar System was already a billion years old before life appeared on Earth; complex life appeared in the Cambrian explosion three billion years later. Inherently bright stars like Sirius and Vega have total life-times of only about 1 billion years, and are unlikely to have nurtured the development of the rich biospheres essential to the existence of "interesting" inhabitants, or even bare habitability. Red giant stars are in a relatively short phase near the end of their lifetimes and are a scorching 100 times brighter than their original luminosity. Variable stars achieve significant brightness, but it may fluctuate over the long run by a total factor of several thousands, as their radii vary by up to 25%.
Except for a few unusually close stars, those stars which are not so intrinsically bright as to be subject to the constraints of brief lifespan or waxing luminosity are at the same time so inconspicuous in the Earth's sky that they lack the proper names[4] that would make them attractive to science fiction authors. And so, plausibly or not, the creators of planets in various science fiction genres have very often cast their imagined habitable — or inhabited — worlds into orbits around the brightest stars in the sky.
Of the 15 stars closest to the Sun, ten are red dwarves, the exceptions being Alpha Centauri AB (classes G and K), Sirius AB (both class A), and Epsilon Eridani (class K). Four of the red dwarves (Proxima Centauri, Barnard's Star, Wolf 359, and UV Ceti) are known or suspected to be flare stars, which may increase in brightness by a factor of 75 over a period of 20 seconds — a poor recommendation for habitability. On the other hand, stars of spectral type G and K are well suited for life. Thus, nine of the closest 15 stars may possess viable Goldilocks zones. Of these, the yellow-orange star Epsilon Eridani actually hosts two asteroid belts and at least two long suspected but unconfirmed (as of 2011) planets, though these would lie beyond its habitable zone.
Although the remaining red dwarves nearest Earth may well harbour planets, their suitability for life is subject to debate on several grounds. Moreover, none of these dwarves are visible to the unaided eye and most only through large telescopes, so that their names are technical star-list designations rather than evocative mythological ones. Nonetheless their very proximity, as well as the favorable availability of Alpha Centauri and Epsilon Eridani, has made them all (even the flare stars) popular choices for fictional accounts of humanity's first extrasolar voyages.
The fictional genres that appear in the list below include films, television serials, interactive games, and print (among others). Of all these, the print genre, and specifically novels and novellas, are of note because they are very often planetary romances. Any science fiction tale whose primary venue is a planet, and whose plot turns on the nature of the planet, can be described as a planetary romance. It is not enough that the story simply be set on a world. For example, James Blish's A Case of Conscience is set on the planet Lithia, but it is not a planetary romance because the nature or description of this world has little bearing on the story being told. In the hard science fiction novels by Hal Clement ((see 61 Cygni: A Mission of Gravity below) and Robert L. Forward ((see Barnard's Star: Rocheworld below), the worlds on which they are set amount to little more than the sum of the physical and logical problems that they illustrate, and that their protagonists solve. In the true planetary romance, the world itself encompasses — and survives — the tale that temporarily illuminates it.[6] One seminal practitioner of the planetary romance was Edgar Rice Burroughs, as for example in his Barsoom (Mars) series (1912-1943). However, as with most writers of his era, his imagination did not extend beyond our own Solar System, so that his work is not found in this article.
Stars may be referred to in fictional works for their metaphorical (meta) or mythological (myth) associations, or else as points of light (light) in the sky of Earth, but not as locations in space or centers of planetary systems:
The Iliad (c. eighth cent BCE), epic poem attributed to Homer. Homer describes the final approach of the Greeks' shining warrior, Achilles, toward Troy by comparing him to the dazzling star Sirius: The aged Priam was the first of all whose eyes saw him / as he swept across the flat land in full shining, like that star / which comes on in the autumn and whose conspicuous brightness / far outshines the stars that are numbered in the night's darkening, / the star they give the name of Orion's Dog, which is brightest / among the stars, and yet is wrought as a sign of evil / and brings on the great fever for unfortunate mortals. / Such was the flare of the bronze that girt his chest in his running.[8] (light, myth)
Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BCE), play by Sophocles. In Scene IV the Corinthian shepherd describes keeping his flocks alongside those of the Theban shepherd all during three distant summers, from spring / Till rose Arcturus. He is trying to stimulate the Theban's memory about their long acquaintance prior to a fateful event: the Theban's entrusting the infant Oedipus to him, to be raised in Corinth, rather than killing the child as instructed by King Laius of Thebes.[9] (light)
Metamorphoses (8 CE), Latin narrative poem by Ovid. The Roman poet describes the apotheosis of the murdered Julius Caesar as Caesar's Comet (C/-43 K1), possibly the brightest daylight comet in recorded history[10]: Kindly Venus, although seen by none, stood in the middle of the Senate-house, and caught from the dying limbs and trunk of her own Caesar his departing soul. She did not give it time so that it could dissolve in air, but bore it quickly up, toward all the stars of heaven; and on the way, she saw it gleam and blaze and set it free. Above the moon it mounted into heaven, leaving behind a long and fiery trail, and as a star it glittered in the sky.[11] (myth)
Julius Caesar (1599), play written by William Shakespeare. In Act III, Scene I, Cassius proclaims his steadfastness, comparing himself to the star Polaris: But I am constant as the northern star, / Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament.[12] (light, meta)
"Polaris" (1920), short story by H. P. Lovecraft. The narrator of the story experiences a series of increasingly substantial dreams about Olathoë, a city of marble lying on a plateau between two peaks, with the "malign presence" of Polaris ever watching in the night sky. At the end of the story, he is convinced that his waking life is not real but a dream from which he cannot awaken. (light)
Mary Poppins (1934), novel by P. L. Travers. One of Mary Poppins' unusual acquaintances, a personified Maia, arrives in London to do some Christmas shopping for the "other stars in the Pleiades." One of 12 Mary Shepard illustrations in the book depicts Maia as a young girl in a diaphanous shift, clutching a parcel of purchases, and mounting an invisible staircase back to her place in the heavens.[13] (meta)
Justine (1957), Alexandria Quartet novel by Lawrence Durrell. The fourth paragraph of this first novel in the quartet describes the effect of Arcturus, the brightest star in the northern sky, on the narrator's somber ruminations: I have had to come so far away from it in order to understand it all! Living on this bare promontory, snatched every night from darkness by Arcturus, far from the lime-laden dust of those summer afternoons, I see at last that none of us is properly to be judged for what happened in the past. It is the city which should be judged though we, its children, must may the price.[14] (light)
The Truelove (1993), Aubrey-Maturin novel (titled Clarissa Oakes in the UK) written by Patrick O'Brian. Jack Aubrey establishes his ship's longitude in the Pacific Ocean without the aid of a marine chronometer by taking "two beautiful lunar[ distance]s (angle readings), the one on Mars, the other on Fomalhaut."[15] (light)
"Dream — The Heart of a Star" (2003), Chapter 3 of the graphic novel The Sandman: Endless Nights written by Neil Gaiman. Mizar appears as a female of blue flame. She is the host of an assembly of various cosmic entities, and the creator of the palace where they meet. (meta)
Melancholia (2011), film written and directed by Lars von Trier. The planet Melancholia, a Counter-Earth long hidden behind the Sun, emerges from cover and appears headed for a close encounter with the Earth, the first evidence of its approach being its dramatic, symbolic occultation of the star Antares. Melancholia passes spectacularly and safely by in the sky, as predicted by astronomers, but then unexpectedly returns and collides with the Earth, bringing about an end to all life on the planet. As this cosmic catastrophe unfolds in the heavens, the film's progagonists huddle futilely in a crude shelter built of wooden sticks. (light)
The notion that there might be inhabited extrasolar planets can be traced at least as far back as Giordano Bruno who, in his De l'infinito, universo e mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, 1584), declared that "There are then innumerable suns, and an infinite number of earths revolve around those suns, [These worlds are inhabited] if not exactly as our own, and if not more nobly, at least no less inhabited and no less nobly." Allusions to inhabitants of other stars' planetary systems remained rare in literature for many centuries thereafter. One of these is found in Voltaire's Micromégas (1752), which features a traveller from Sirius.
As science fiction became established in the early 20th century, destinations such as the Moon, Mars, Venus and other bodies within the Solar System began to seem stale. Authors invoked a variety of mechanisms for superluminal travel and placed their stories on worlds in planetary systems around other stars, a shift that gave them the freedom to construct exotic fictional planets and themes. This tendency became predominant once the exploration of the Solar System was complete enough to conclusively demonstrate the unlikelihood of any highly developed form of extraterrestrial life there.
Although some of the stars named in works of science fiction are purely imaginary, many authors and artists have preferred to use the names of real stars that are well known to astronomers, either because they are notably bright in the sky or because they are relatively close to Earth.
Despite the increasing tempo of discovery of extrasolar planets in the galactic vicinity of the Sun, the prospects for the realization of imagined habitable worlds around the brightest stars are not good. Assuming that the Earth is typical, these stars are poor candidates to host planets supporting advanced life. The Solar System was already a billion years old before life appeared on Earth; complex life appeared in the Cambrian explosion three billion years later. Inherently bright stars like Sirius and Vega have total life-times of only about 1 billion years, and are unlikely to have nurtured the development of the rich biospheres essential to the existence of "interesting" inhabitants, or even bare habitability. Red giant stars are in a relatively short phase near the end of their lifetimes and are a scorching 100 times brighter than their original luminosity. Variable stars achieve significant brightness, but it may fluctuate over the long run by a total factor of several thousands, as their radii vary by up to 25%.
Except for a few unusually close stars, those stars which are not so intrinsically bright as to be subject to the constraints of brief lifespan or waxing luminosity are at the same time so inconspicuous in the Earth's sky that they lack the proper names[4] that would make them attractive to science fiction authors. And so, plausibly or not, the creators of planets in various science fiction genres have very often cast their imagined habitable — or inhabited — worlds into orbits around the brightest stars in the sky.
Of the 15 stars closest to the Sun, ten are red dwarves, the exceptions being Alpha Centauri AB (classes G and K), Sirius AB (both class A), and Epsilon Eridani (class K). Four of the red dwarves (Proxima Centauri, Barnard's Star, Wolf 359, and UV Ceti) are known or suspected to be flare stars, which may increase in brightness by a factor of 75 over a period of 20 seconds — a poor recommendation for habitability. On the other hand, stars of spectral type G and K are well suited for life. Thus, nine of the closest 15 stars may possess viable Goldilocks zones. Of these, the yellow-orange star Epsilon Eridani actually hosts two asteroid belts and at least two long suspected but unconfirmed (as of 2011) planets, though these would lie beyond its habitable zone.
Although the remaining red dwarves nearest Earth may well harbour planets, their suitability for life is subject to debate on several grounds. Moreover, none of these dwarves are visible to the unaided eye and most only through large telescopes, so that their names are technical star-list designations rather than evocative mythological ones. Nonetheless their very proximity, as well as the favorable availability of Alpha Centauri and Epsilon Eridani, has made them all (even the flare stars) popular choices for fictional accounts of humanity's first extrasolar voyages.
The fictional genres that appear in the list below include films, television serials, interactive games, and print (among others). Of all these, the print genre, and specifically novels and novellas, are of note because they are very often planetary romances. Any science fiction tale whose primary venue is a planet, and whose plot turns on the nature of the planet, can be described as a planetary romance. It is not enough that the story simply be set on a world. For example, James Blish's A Case of Conscience is set on the planet Lithia, but it is not a planetary romance because the nature or description of this world has little bearing on the story being told. In the hard science fiction novels by Hal Clement ((see 61 Cygni: A Mission of Gravity below) and Robert L. Forward ((see Barnard's Star: Rocheworld below), the worlds on which they are set amount to little more than the sum of the physical and logical problems that they illustrate, and that their protagonists solve. In the true planetary romance, the world itself encompasses — and survives — the tale that temporarily illuminates it.[6] One seminal practitioner of the planetary romance was Edgar Rice Burroughs, as for example in his Barsoom (Mars) series (1912-1943). However, as with most writers of his era, his imagination did not extend beyond our own Solar System, so that his work is not found in this article.
Stars may be referred to in fictional works for their metaphorical (meta) or mythological (myth) associations, or else as points of light (light) in the sky of Earth, but not as locations in space or centers of planetary systems:
The Iliad (c. eighth cent BCE), epic poem attributed to Homer. Homer describes the final approach of the Greeks' shining warrior, Achilles, toward Troy by comparing him to the dazzling star Sirius: The aged Priam was the first of all whose eyes saw him / as he swept across the flat land in full shining, like that star / which comes on in the autumn and whose conspicuous brightness / far outshines the stars that are numbered in the night's darkening, / the star they give the name of Orion's Dog, which is brightest / among the stars, and yet is wrought as a sign of evil / and brings on the great fever for unfortunate mortals. / Such was the flare of the bronze that girt his chest in his running.[8] (light, myth)
Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BCE), play by Sophocles. In Scene IV the Corinthian shepherd describes keeping his flocks alongside those of the Theban shepherd all during three distant summers, from spring / Till rose Arcturus. He is trying to stimulate the Theban's memory about their long acquaintance prior to a fateful event: the Theban's entrusting the infant Oedipus to him, to be raised in Corinth, rather than killing the child as instructed by King Laius of Thebes.[9] (light)
Metamorphoses (8 CE), Latin narrative poem by Ovid. The Roman poet describes the apotheosis of the murdered Julius Caesar as Caesar's Comet (C/-43 K1), possibly the brightest daylight comet in recorded history[10]: Kindly Venus, although seen by none, stood in the middle of the Senate-house, and caught from the dying limbs and trunk of her own Caesar his departing soul. She did not give it time so that it could dissolve in air, but bore it quickly up, toward all the stars of heaven; and on the way, she saw it gleam and blaze and set it free. Above the moon it mounted into heaven, leaving behind a long and fiery trail, and as a star it glittered in the sky.[11] (myth)
Julius Caesar (1599), play written by William Shakespeare. In Act III, Scene I, Cassius proclaims his steadfastness, comparing himself to the star Polaris: But I am constant as the northern star, / Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament.[12] (light, meta)
"Polaris" (1920), short story by H. P. Lovecraft. The narrator of the story experiences a series of increasingly substantial dreams about Olathoë, a city of marble lying on a plateau between two peaks, with the "malign presence" of Polaris ever watching in the night sky. At the end of the story, he is convinced that his waking life is not real but a dream from which he cannot awaken. (light)
Mary Poppins (1934), novel by P. L. Travers. One of Mary Poppins' unusual acquaintances, a personified Maia, arrives in London to do some Christmas shopping for the "other stars in the Pleiades." One of 12 Mary Shepard illustrations in the book depicts Maia as a young girl in a diaphanous shift, clutching a parcel of purchases, and mounting an invisible staircase back to her place in the heavens.[13] (meta)
Justine (1957), Alexandria Quartet novel by Lawrence Durrell. The fourth paragraph of this first novel in the quartet describes the effect of Arcturus, the brightest star in the northern sky, on the narrator's somber ruminations: I have had to come so far away from it in order to understand it all! Living on this bare promontory, snatched every night from darkness by Arcturus, far from the lime-laden dust of those summer afternoons, I see at last that none of us is properly to be judged for what happened in the past. It is the city which should be judged though we, its children, must may the price.[14] (light)
The Truelove (1993), Aubrey-Maturin novel (titled Clarissa Oakes in the UK) written by Patrick O'Brian. Jack Aubrey establishes his ship's longitude in the Pacific Ocean without the aid of a marine chronometer by taking "two beautiful lunar[ distance]s (angle readings), the one on Mars, the other on Fomalhaut."[15] (light)
"Dream — The Heart of a Star" (2003), Chapter 3 of the graphic novel The Sandman: Endless Nights written by Neil Gaiman. Mizar appears as a female of blue flame. She is the host of an assembly of various cosmic entities, and the creator of the palace where they meet. (meta)
Melancholia (2011), film written and directed by Lars von Trier. The planet Melancholia, a Counter-Earth long hidden behind the Sun, emerges from cover and appears headed for a close encounter with the Earth, the first evidence of its approach being its dramatic, symbolic occultation of the star Antares. Melancholia passes spectacularly and safely by in the sky, as predicted by astronomers, but then unexpectedly returns and collides with the Earth, bringing about an end to all life on the planet. As this cosmic catastrophe unfolds in the heavens, the film's progagonists huddle futilely in a crude shelter built of wooden sticks. (light)
