Black holes in fiction
Recurring themes in stories depicting micro black holes include spaceship propulsion, threatening or causing the destruction of the Earth, and serving as a source of gravity in outer-space settlements.
[3][7] 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.
[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".
[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.
[4][21] In the 2009 film Star Trek, a black hole created to neutralize a supernova threat has the side-effect of transporting two nearby spaceships into the past, where they end up altering the course of history.
[6] In Bolivian science fiction writer Giovanna Rivero's 2012 novel Helena 2022: La vera crónica de un naufragio en el tiempo, a spaceship ends up in 1630s Italy as a result of an accidental encounter with a black hole.
[1][12][14] Primordial black holes could theoretically be of virtually any conceivable size, though the smallest ones would by now have evaporated into nothing due to the quantum mechanical effect known as Hawking radiation.
[4][10][12] Small black holes are used to power spaceship propulsion in Arthur C. Clarke's 1975 novel Imperial Earth, Charles Sheffield's 1978 short story "Killing Vector", and the 1997 film Event Horizon.
[2][3][5][10][13] Artificial black holes that are created unintentionally at nuclear facilities appear in Michael McCollum's 1979 short story "Scoop" and Martin Caidin's 1980 novel Star Bright.
[9][12] In Benford's Galactic Center Saga, starting with the 1977 novel In the Ocean of Night, the vicinity of the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center of the Milky Way makes an attractive destination for spacefaring civilizations due to the high concentration of stars that can serve as sources of energy in the region; a similar use is found for a regular-sized black hole in Benford's 1986 short story "As Big as the Ritz", where its accretion disk provides ample solar energy for a space habitat.
[2][3][24] McAuley's 1991 novel Eternal Light involves a journey to the central supermassive black hole to investigate a hypervelocity star on a trajectory towards the Solar System.
[3][25][26] According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, "the immense black hole at the galactic core has become almost a cliché of contemporary space opera" such as Greg Egan's 2008 novel Incandescence.
[2][14][27] In Isaac Asimov's 1976 short story "Old-fashioned", astronauts surmise that an unseen object keeping them in orbit must be a modestly-sized black hole, having wreaked havoc with their spaceship through tidal forces.
[3][10][29] In Stephen Baxter's 1993 short story "Pilot", a spaceship extracts energy from a rotating black hole's ergosphere to widen its event horizon and cause a pursuer to fall into it.
