Sun in fiction
As more became known about the Sun through advances in astronomy, in particular its temperature, solar inhabitants fell out of favour save for the occasional more exotic alien lifeforms.
Before it was understood that the Sun is powered by nuclear fusion, the prevailing assumption among writers was that combustion was the source of its heat and light, and it was expected to run out of fuel relatively soon.
When audiences grew weary of this trope by the 1930s or 1940s, eclipses became much more rare in fiction writing, though they saw a comeback towards the end of the century as harbingers of social upheaval.
[2][4][5][6] In the 1900s, as it became evident that no conventional organisms could possibly survive the conditions on the Sun, more exotic solar lifeforms started appearing in fiction.
[5][6] Others take up residence elsewhere in the Solar System: in Leigh Brackett's 1942 short story "Child of the Sun", an intelligent alien from the Sun lives on the fictional planet Vulcan inside the orbit of Mercury,[6][12] and the titular creatures of Olaf Stapledon's 1947 novel The Flames are lizard-like solar beings residing inside igneous rocks on Earth.
[2][4][5][6] The earliest such stories were inspired by the assumption that the heat and light of the Sun were products of combustion, and that the fuel sustaining it would eventually run out.
[4][18] Physicist Lord Kelvin estimated in 1862 that the Sun would fade within a few million years, a timeframe that was later incorporated in stories by Camille Flammarion and H. G. Wells, among others.
B. S. Haldane's 1927 work "The Last Judgment" and Olaf Stapledon's 1930 novel Last and First Men both outlining the future evolution of humanity throughout millions of years of variation in solar luminosity.
[4][5][44] The Sun exploding occasionally appears as a background event to explain why humanity has abandoned Earth in favour of colonizing the cosmos,[45] one example being Theodore Sturgeon's 1956 short story "The Skills of Xanadu".
[38][46] In Norman Spinrad's 1966 novel The Solarians, the Sun is intentionally made to explode in an act of interstellar warfare,[4][5][38] while in Larry Niven's 1971 short story "The Fourth Profession" aliens plan to induce such an event to use as a power source for space travel.
[4][5][48] Connie Willis's 1979 short story "Daisy, in the Sun" is a coming-of-age parable that relates a young girl getting her first period to the imminent end of the world.
[2][4][5][54] The 1990 film Solar Crisis depicts a mission to bomb the Sun to avert the destruction that could be caused by an immense predicted solar flare,[17][35] while the 2005 novel Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter portrays mankind constructing a large shielding object at the Sun–Earth L1 Lagrange point as protection against the threat posed by a similar event.
[4][5][55] In David Koepp's 2022 novel Aurora, a coronal mass ejection threatens to end human civilization; the book appears alongside Niven's "Inconstant Moon" on a list of science fiction works with relatively scientifically plausible depictions of the Sun compiled by astronomer Andrew Fraknoi.
[6][60] Other works have depicted solar arrays in close orbits around the Sun itself;[1] Murray Leinster's 1931 short story "The Power Planet" features a variant that uses thermoelectric rather than photovoltaic principles.
[64] Using knowledge of the underlying astronomy to be able to predict eclipses mathematically is a common trope—according to Stableford, it "became a key method by which European explorers could impress superstitious native populations in adventure stories".
[5][64] In a variation on the theme, Mark Twain's 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court depicts a time traveller using an almanac in this way to impress the people in Medieval Britain and become a person of influence.
[64] According to science fiction scholar Lisa Yaszek, the decades around the turn of the millennium saw the emergence of a trend wherein marginalized groups "experience a reversal of fortunes when the Moon takes center stage and blots out the Sun".
[4][5][72] In science fiction horror films, sunspots are occasionally invoked as the cause of various types of abnormal phenomena such as zombies and mass delusions.
[4][5] In John W. Campbell's 1935 short story "Blindness", a scientist studies the Sun at close range in order to solve the mysteries of nuclear energy at great personal cost, only to find that the method for getting there was worth more than the discoveries made.
[6][73] Willy Ley's 1937 short story "At the Perihelion" involves a close approach to the Sun as part of an escape from Mars,[4][5][74] and Charles L. Harness's 1949 novel The Paradox Men (a.k.a.
[4][5][75][76] In Ray Bradbury's 1953 short story "The Golden Apples of the Sun", a crewed solar sample-return mission requires a spaceship to be cooled to near-absolute zero to endure the extreme heat during the critical phase.
[2][4][6][17] According to The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, the Sun is usually male in fictional mythologies where it is personified, though some exceptions exist such as the legendarium of J. R. R. Tolkien, in whose cosmology it is female.
