Murasaki (novel)

Murasaki is a 1992 "shared universe" hard science fiction novel in six parts to which Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin, Nancy Kress and Frederik Pohl each contributed one chapter; it was edited by Robert Silverberg.

This constellation orbits Murasaki within the habitable zone, at a distance of only 0.223 astronomical units (sidereal year, 66 Earth days) where the planets receive about the same amount of total irradiation Mars gets from the Sun; however, with a spectral power distribution shifted to much longer wavelengths.

Because most of this chilly planet's water is locked in permafrost and glaciers, the atmosphere (which has a sea-level pressure of 0.7 bar, equivalent to about 3,650 m altitude on Earth) is not only thin but also uncomfortably dry.

Once they have reached a size of about 40 x 10 cm and are too big to get around readily on land, they follow chemical clues to the tidelands where they join older juveniles, the "calves" which are fully intelligent, mostly aquatic, live in bands, and have a culture about which little is known (and even less understood) by human researchers or by the Ihrdizu which used to enslave them.

Once the calves are too big for the rough tidal waters they swim to the open sea to become "carpet whales" which measure from 5 meters length upwards, and might live for millennia.

It is actually a hull intended for transport between asteroid habitats in the human solar system which the Spacers have hastily fitted with an interstellar drive after having intercepted the signals from the Japanese robot probe that reported Earth-like planets and intelligent life at Murasaki.

As the Japanese expedition force arrives much earlier than had been expected, the Spacers hastily break camp because the first Murasaki samples returned to the human solar system would be the economically most valuable.

One such effigy is later found to reflect reality: in the high mountain areas of Chujo, huge mat-like organisms lift off the rocks on excreted hydrogen and form "bioloons" in which several Chupchups attempt to leave the planet; all who try it die.

The main base of the Japanese expedition is on Genji, where researchers establish good relations with the Ihrdizu civilization; machine translation between the languages is not perfect but sufficient for simple communication.

As the sociology and history of the Ihrdizu are slowly uncovered, it is revealed that not all is as it seems; the race must have gone through many cycles of technological rise and fall; the invention of metallurgy and advance to the equivalent of an early industrial revolution must have occurred at least six or seven times.

A plague caused by calcium-seeking Chujoan microorganisms has reduced their number to 20, including their leader Carnot who proselytizes among the Ihrdizu communities, preaching an adapted version of his teaching of "Jesus the Physicist" who will at one time reunite the sapients of Genji and Chujo.

Rita Byrne is dispatched from Genji base station to seek out Malchiel Holden, a reclusive and somewhat sociopathic biologist who investigates the himatides, and has gained some understanding of their habits and body language.

Without apparent reason the carpet whales, who normally graze in the polar waters of Genji's Starside, start swimming towards Moonside, converging towards the point where Chujo is exactly overhead.

At the sub-Genji node on the sister planet, the huge living mats (now known to consist of microorganisms related to those that caused the plague) again form bioloons, but this time they transport Chupchups to Genji, guided by bioluminescent signals from the carpet whales.

[3][4] Besides being a unique collaborative work of the world's foremost science fiction authors of the late 20th century, the Murasaki anthology tells several valuable lessons.

Genji and Chujo both are as terrestrial planets as one could reasonably expect to find, but the relatively minor deviations of their masses from Earth standard result in an atmospheric pressure gradient where unaided breathing is possible only at some places, even though the composition of gases is right for humans.

Neither the initial caution against biological and cultural contamination nor the subsequent missionary efforts among the Ihrdizu have had the slightest effect, simply because the ecosystems as well as the societies are just too alien to suffer or benefit from human actions short of mass slaughter.

"[5] A review from Publishers Weekly stated that the book's stories "are linked and form a novel-like progression" compared to Medea, but critiqued the "little distinctions among their six chapters".

[7] The "Murasaki Universe" has not been explored further after the original anthology had been published, although (as Robert Silverberg stated in his editorial) "even these six top-flight writers didn't begin to exhaust the background material.