I’m clearly going to have to write faster. I mean … seriously. It seems that science might be catching up to my fiction.
Why do I say that, you ask?
Well, I’m doing this science fiction series that’s an intergalactic thing based on three short stories I wrote for Analog some time back. Given that the entire series is titled Stealing the Sun and that the first paragraph of the story is about the idea of why Alpha Centauri A (part of the Alpha Centauri triple) was selected for being … uh … stolen, I think it’s safe for me to let that little plot-point out of the bag. So, the whole driver of the action and events surrounding my story (stories) is about efforts to harness the energy of a star, and the effects of that on many things, among them, the planets in the system.
Now, along comes this news about inhabitable planets in the Centauri system (in this case, Proxima rather than Rigel Kent, but still). So, yeah, earth-like planets in the Centauri system. Check.
Add to that this semi-recent, but totally incorrect piece saying that no-one can tell why ‘Tabby’s Star,’ otherwise known as the megastructure star, is steadily diming, and you’ve got both elements of my story, completely come to life. What part of that incorrect, you ask? Well, the whole thing where no one knows what’s happening. This part:
“I’d say we have no good explanation right now for what’s going on with Tabby’s star,” Jason Wright, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, said earlier this month during a talk at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View, California. “For now, it’s still a mystery.”
I mean, heck yeah I can tell you why the Mega-structure star is fading—it’s because some intelligent species (or not so intelligent?) has tied a multi-dimensional wormhole to it, and is beginning to explore the universe with its resultant Faster-than-Light travel.
I mean, isn’t that obvious?
Luckily, in a few short months when my books come out, you guys who now know the truth will be able to read a work of fiction built around these now-true facts.
That’s my story, anyway. And I’m sticking to it.