Black holes in fiction

Spatial anomalies in fiction
Black holes in fiction • Portable hole • Teleportation in fiction • Wormholes in fiction • Stargate • Warp drive • Hyperspace • Time travel in fiction
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Black holes, objects whose gravity is so strong that nothing—including light—can escape them, have been depicted in fiction since at least the pulp era of science fiction, before the term black hole was coined.

Early depictions

The general concept of black holes, objects whose gravity is so strong that nothing—including light—can escape them, was first proposed by John Michell in 1783 and developed further in the framework of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916.^[1][2][3][4] Serious scientific attention remained relatively limited until the 1960s, the same decade the term black hole was coined,^[a] though objects with the general characteristics of black holes had made appearances in fiction decades earlier during the pulp era of science fiction.^{[1][2][3][4][5]} Examples of this include E. E. Smith's 1928 novel The Skylark of Space with its "black sun", Frank K. Kelly [Wikidata]'s 1935 short story "Starship Invincible" with its "Hole in Space", and Nat Schachner's 1938 short story "Negative Space"—all of which portray the black holes avant la lettre as hazards to spacefarers.^[1][2] Later works that nevertheless predate the adoption of the current terminology include Fred Saberhagen's 1965 short story "Masque of the Red Shift" with its "hypermass" and the 1967 Star Trek episode "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" with its "black star".^[3][5]

Time dilation

Once black holes gained mainstream popularity, many of the early works featuring black holes focused on the concept of gravitational time dilation, whereby time passes more slowly closer to a black hole due to the effects of general relativity.^[2][4] One consequence of this is that the process of crossing the event horizon appears to an outside observer to take an infinite amount of time.^[3][6] In Poul Anderson's 1968 short story "Kyrie", a telepathic scream from a being falling into a black hole thus becomes drawn out for eternity.^[3][6][7] Similarly, a spaceship appears forever immovable at the event horizon in Brian Aldiss's 1976 short story "The Dark Soul of the Night",^[2][6] and 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.^[3][6] 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.^[1][3][4][8] In Bill Johnson's 1982 short story "Meet Me at Apogee", travel to various levels of time dilation is commercialized, used by people with incurable diseases among others.^[9] In the 2014 film Interstellar, a planet orbits a black hole so closely that it experiences time dilation with a factor of approximately 60,000 relative to Earth.^[5][10]

Space travel

Black holes have also been portrayed as ways to travel through space rather than time, acting as entrances to wormholes in works such as the 1974 novel The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.^[1][3][4]

Energy source

Other uses of black holes have been conceived, one being as a source of energy as in Gregory Benford's 1986 short story "As Big As the Ritz".^[1][2][3]

Micro black holes

Micro black holes were first depicted in Larry Niven's 1974 short story "The Hole Man", and were later used as a means of powering spaceship propulsion in the 1975 novel Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke and a way to provide an artificial gravity of sorts in Charles Sheffield's novel Proteus Unbound from 1989.^[1][2][4] Conversely, an enormous yet low-density black hole appears in Barry N. Malzberg's 1975 novel Galaxies.^[11]

Interior

Black holes have been depicted with varying degrees of accuracy to the scientific understanding of them. Because what lies beyond the event horizon is unknown and by definition unobservable from outside, authors have been free to employ artistic license when depicting the interiors of black holes.^[4][10][12] The 1979 Disney film The Black Hole features a completely fictionalized version of a black hole, both with regard to its outside and its inside.^[2][3][10]

Sentient

Anthropomorphized, thinking black holes are seen in a handful of works including Benford's 2000 novel Eater.^[1][12]

See also

• Black hole starship
• Stars in fiction
• Supernovae in fiction

Notes

References

Further reading

• Bloom, Steven D. (2016). "Stellar Evolution: Supernovas, Pulsars, and Black Holes". The Physics and Astronomy of Science Fiction: Understanding Interstellar Travel, Teleportation, Time Travel, Alien Life and Other Genre Fixtures. McFarland. pp. 38–43. ISBN 978-0-7864-7053-2.
• Bly, Robert W. (2005). "Black Holes". The Science in Science Fiction: 83 SF Predictions That Became Scientific Reality. Consulting Editor: James Gunn. BenBella Books. pp. 67–74. ISBN 978-1-932100-48-8.
• May, Andrew (2023). "Gravity". How Space Physics Really Works: Lessons from Well-Constructed Science Fiction. Science and Fiction. Springer. pp. 52–56. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-33950-9_2. ISBN 978-3-031-33950-9.