Black holes in fiction Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Background science

The concept of a body so massive that even light could not escape goes back to the late 18th century. With the development of General Relativity, it was realized that such bodies would have other odd properties. The idea was developed further, though the term 'black hole' was only coined in 1967 and did not become the norm until later. These hypothetical objects were also called frozen stars.

Early uses

Eleanor Cameron's Juvenile SF novel Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet (1956) describes a group of meteors encountering, circling, and falling into a "hole in space" in which time stops and from which nothing can return.

Roger Zelazny's SF novel Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969) contains the concept, something called Skagganauk Abyss where there is no space or time.

The Black Sun in Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars (1956) is sometimes interpreted as a black hole. It is definitely made so in Gregory Benford's Beyond the Fall of Night (1990).

Popularisation

As a growing number of scientists began to believe Black Holes were real, and as they began to appear in works of popular science, they also became frequent elements in Science Fiction stories:

• Larry Niven wrote several short stories based on mini-black holes, including The Hole Man (1974) and The Borderland of Sol in Tales of Known Space, 1975.
• Frederik Pohl's Heechee series includes black holes of several sorts. This starts with Gateway (1976).
• Stephen Baxter's 2004 novel Exultant features a war between humans and aliens based around a supermassive black hole at the core of our galaxy.

Films

• The Black Hole (1979) was a major science fiction movie featuring a black hole.
• In Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), it is stated that Voyager 6 disappeared into "what they used to call a black hole".
• Black Hole is the title of a science fiction movie released in 2006. It is unrelated to the 1979 film.
• In Event Horizon (film) (1997), a spaceship is created to travel faster than light by a machine that creates an artificial black hole to travel to Alpha Centauri. The ship actually passes into an unknown dimension.
• In Star Trek (film) (2009), "red matter" is used by Spock to create an artificial black hole to absorb a supernova, and later by Nero to destroy Vulcan.