Stars in fiction
Stars themselves are rarely a point of focus in fiction, their most common role being an indirect one as hosts of planetary systems.
Stars being depicted as sentient beings—whether portrayed as supernatural entities, personified in human form, or simply anthropomorphized as having intelligence—is a recurring theme.
Real stars occasionally make appearances in science fiction, especially the nearest: the Alpha Centauri system, often portrayed as the destination of the first interstellar voyage.
Among the earliest depictions of stars as locations that can be visited is Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle's 1686 work Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds).
[1] The centuries that followed saw further such portrayals in Emanuel Swedenborg's 1758 work De Telluribus in Mundo Nostro Solari (Concerning the Earths in Our Solar System), C. I. Defontenay's 1854 novel Star ou Psi de Cassiopée (Star: Psi Cassiopeia), and Camille Flammarion's 1887 novel Lumen, but they remained rare throughout this time period.
[3] In Isaac Asimov's 1941 short story "Nightfall", the first sight of a star-filled night sky, from a planet that is otherwise in daylight from at least one of its many suns for millennia at a time, drives people to madness.
[1][3][5][6] The opposite occurrence, of the stars disappearing from view, appears in Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 short story "The Nine Billion Names of God" and heralds the end of the universe.
[...] However, in the main, the stars themselves remain relatively untouched in the pages of SF, and exist simply as a means of providing light and warmth to planets they we may wish to visit or colonize.
[1][11] In Vernor Vinge's 1999 novel A Deepness in the Sky, a variable star leaves the inhabitants of one of its planets in lengthy periods of hibernation during its phases of decreased output.
[3] One concept for maximizing this potential is enclosing the entire star in a Dyson sphere, thus making it possible to harness all of its energy output[a] rather than just the fraction emitted in a particular direction.
[3][15] Variations on the concept also appear, for instance a half-sphere of the same kind as in Larry Niven and Gregory Benford's 2012 novel Bowl of Heaven, where the open half allows the star to be used for propulsion through space via a so-called Shkadov thruster.
[5][19][20] The notion that the Sun might explode in this manner serves as the basis for numerous disaster stories,[5][19][18][21] though it is now recognized that this cannot actually happen as the necessary stellar conditions are not met.
[2][5][23] These objects are characterized by very strong gravitational fields yet comparatively small sizes on the order of a few kilometers or miles, resulting in extreme tidal forces in their proximity.
[20][23] Neutron stars are depicted as harbouring life on the surface and interior, respectively, in Robert L. Forward's 1980 novel Dragon's Egg and Stephen Baxter's 1993 novel Flux.
[3] Another common motif is the use of black holes to traverse vast distances through space quickly, often by serving as the entrance to a wormhole;[f] examples include Joe Haldeman's 1974 fix-up novel The Forever War and Joan D. Vinge's 1980 novel The Snow Queen.
[36] In 2015, Andrew Liptak [Wikidata] interviewed several authors about why they used Tau Ceti for their stories; in addition to the star's relative proximity to Earth, Ursula K. Le Guin (who wrote The Dispossessed, 1974) and Larry Niven (The Legacy of Heorot, 1987, with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes) cited the star's similarity to the Sun, while Kim Stanley Robinson (Aurora, 2015) pointed to the recent discovery of several exoplanets around Tau Ceti.
