Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel
Page 39
A great problem with world creation is when it becomes an end in itself. When this happens, it can become a rather neurotic attempt to contain a world and to nail down a world totally—which is, of course, impossible. You end up with clunky fiction, walking your characters through all the places you’ve created, simply because you have created them. This is akin to the age-old heritage of the infodump—By God, I suffered through all this research and now it’s your turn. It’s best not to fill in everything on a map. It’s meaningless. Leave things unknown—because there’s so damn much of it.
The best reason to do such work is simple: It’s fun! We take each other’s notions and send them zipping off on different vectors. We worked best when we could sit, talk, think, build in stacks the ideas that started with the first idea: a vast bowl built to capture and refocus a star’s own radiation. Why? To manage the star. Why? So the whole system, Bowl plus star, can move in cohort … to explore the galaxy. How? The sunlight reflected back on the star fires off a jet, which pushes the star … and the Bowl of Heaven follows like a tethered animal.
Tricky, yes—and managed by beings who would think of this and make it happen. That got us going, for sure. We started on Bowl of Heaven and realized about half a year later we couldn’t do the story in a single volume. So we wrote Bowl of Heaven and then Shipstar to work out the whole Bowl society. But we hadn’t gotten to the Bowl’s destination, which our human characters were headed for, too. So to follow the theme of Big Smart Objects, we followed the logic and designed a wholly new system. The Glorian double planet echoes the flyby of Pluto and Charon that is indeed a natural, mutually tide-locked system (though we had the idea before that). If our system has one such, there must be more among the stars.
At each stage, we try out ideas on each other, write scenes, bounce them between us in the ping-pong of creation. Writing is a solitary craft, but!—uniquely, science fiction encourages collaboration, echoing its core culture: science itself, in which single-author papers are a decided minority. So our novels come from this ping-pong, making writing fun for and of itself. Larry likes doing aliens and their odd thoughts, as in his Known Space stories. Gregory likes the designer aspects—how does the Bowl work?
And this new place, Glory? We had only vaguely imagined it when we started on the first novel. More mega-engineering! Plus room for ingenious physics. We don’t think any other kind of writing can do this. Which means SF is more fun than, say, mysteries, for the writer(s)—and that plural is key.
In the end, we realized that these novels are a way to think about what truly long-lived societies may be like. We humans have a built-in inclination to go over the horizon, expand, occupy. No other species has occupied every continent and co-opted so much of its energy and land. So might alien societies. To get more living room, they might build Big Smart Objects and then move on to other interesting pursuits. The Bowl goes touring the galaxy. The Glorian system ponders deep issues like the stability of the universe itself, and how to avoid disasters that come from mega-engineering hubris. Could this be how the long-lived civilizations think, that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence might find? If so, it’s worth thinking now about how to talk to them.
You might want to pursue some of our ideas further:
DOUBLE PLANETS
These have a Wikipedia entry, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_planet.
How common might they be? Well, we have Pluto and Charon, so maybe such worlds in a star’s habitable zone are common. Imagine evolving intelligence with such a tempting bauble in your sky.
Such a notion occurred in the early 1960s in the novel by Brian W. Aldiss, Hothouse (London: Faber & Faber, 1962). A line from it: “The multitudinous strands of cable floated across the gap between them, uniting the worlds. Back and forth the traversers could shuttle at will, vegetable astronauts huge and insensible, with Earth and Luna both enmeshed in their indifferent net.”
SMART DINOSAURS
The emerging new family tree of dinosaurs makes an interesting case about dino intelligence:
“A new hypothesis of dinosaur relationships and early dinosaur evolution” by Matthew G. Baron, David B. Norman, and Paul M. Barrett, published in Nature 543 (March 23, 2017). It says in part, “The results of this study challenge more than a century of dogma and recover an unexpected tree topology that necessitates fundamental reassessment of early dinosaur evolution.”
More than one thousand species have already been identified, most of them dating from between two hundred million and sixty-six million years ago. Dinosaurs became the dominant terrestrial species after the first date, and perished, all save the lineage leading to birds, at the second. The authors comment, “In the very harsh climates of the late Triassic, being a generalist is probably a clever strategy. The ability to run fast and eat anything and grasp with the hands is what gave dinosaurs their advantage.”
These advantages also aided humans, and the Folk of the Bowl. A critical stage in human evolution was walking upright, which freed the hands for grasping tools and weapons. “The parallels with human evolution are very noticeable and make you wonder what they could have achieved,” the scientists said. “Toward the end, certain groups like the velociraptors were starting to get intelligent.”
The new tree implies that dinosaurs emerged some 247 million years ago, a little earlier than previous estimates, and that their origin may not have been in South America, where several very early dinosaurs have been found. This fits with the background we used in Bowl of Heaven. It’s worth noting that all traces of a dinosaur civilization would have been ground up by tectonic plate movement. We don’t actually propose that the Bowl was built by dinosaurs, but it is a fun idea, and brings forth our underlying theme of how long-lasting societies might evolve to build big structures.
VACUUM DECAY
This advanced idea from quantum cosmology first came to Benford through a paper by his old friend Sidney Coleman, of Harvard. Sidney’s papers were not like anyone else’s—clear, deceptively simple, yet profound. One of his classic quotes, from that paper with de Luccia on “Gravitational Effects on and of Vacuum Decay” (Physical Review D, June 1980) is:
The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.
Plenty of people aspire to be profound and playful at the same time; Sidney could pull it off, and had the technical chops to back it up. It’s plausible that advanced societies might study such issues, at mortal danger to the entire universe. Certainly worth worrying about!
Once a shift to a lower energy state occurs, a bubble will expand throughout at the speed of light, making the universe as it was in the beginning: reheating, creating a hot plasma of elementary particles. Our beginning plasma expanded, cooled, and emitted the cosmic background radiation. Then gravity made the plasma clump, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, whatever that means. All that came before is gone. For further ideas see https://physics.aps.org/articles/v8/108.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Two artists have helped us envision the gigantic structures and events of this three-novel sequence, most deeply the extraordinary astronomical artist Don Davis. He was an invaluable resource. Brenda Cox Giguere made all the matchless zingo illustrations in fine line drawings. We used our own photos of things that we took to look unearthly.
To Al Jackson for extensive work on gravitational radiation from black holes—including a coauthored paper with Benford: “A Gravitational Wave Transmitter,” https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02334.
We consulted earlier parallel ideas to the Cobweb: Step
hen Baxter’s story “Goose Summer” and “The Trellis” by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper, plus Robert L. Forward’s novel Rocheworld. The Cobweb is a built lifezone, though, not just a connector.
Shell world advice we got from Ken Roy and Robert Kennedy, who with David E. Fields published the original paper,”Shell Worlds” in Acta Astronautica 82. Others who advised them on this are David Bowman, B. Derk Bruins, Dwayne A. Day, H. Keith Henson, Eric Hughes, Les Johnson, Michael R. Johnson, Greg Matloff, Amarak Panya, John Wharton, Martha Knowles, and David Woolsey. Our shell worlds differ somewhat in physics, of course, for Glory is a more besieged world, as one of a pair of exotic planets.
Our wise agent, Eleanor Wood, deserves special thanks, as does Bob Gleason, who stepped in to edit the book after its contracting editor, David Hartwell, tragically died.
Thanks also to those who made comments on the manuscript: Dave Truesdale, Rob Jackson, Brenda Cox Giguere, James Benford, and our concluding editor, Robert Davis. We are grateful for all their help.
This has been a decade-long project, and much fun. We hope our readers enjoy it, too.
On an autobiographical note, GB’s early choice of smart birds as aliens, the Folk, may well stem from his experience while growing up in southern Alabama, south of Fairhope, on his grandparents’ farm beside Fish River. The picture below shows him with twin brother, Jim, about age five, confronting the chickens they started feeding with ground dry corn kernels. Chickens thronged the corn-throwers as soon as the boys began grinding the corn through the kernel stripper. Force was essential to avoid getting hit by birds flying to get to the grub first. Early experience can shape fiction! Of course, we didn’t know then that birds came from the dinosaurs.
BOOKS BY GREGORY BENFORD AND LARRY NIVEN
Bowl of Heaven
Shipstar
TOR BOOKS BY GREGORY BENFORD
Jupiter Project
The Stars in Shroud
Shiva Descending
Artifact
In Alien Flesh
Far Futures
Beyond Human
TOR BOOKS BY LARRY NIVEN
N-Space
Destiny’s Road
Rainbow Mars
Scatterbrain
Ringworld’s Children
The Draco Tavern
Stars and Gods
Playgrounds of the Mind
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GREGORY BENFORD teaches at the University of California and lives in Irvine, California. Benford is a winner of the United Nations Medal for Literature, and the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. In 1995 he received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. Benford conducts research in plasma turbulence theory and experimentation, and in astrophysics. He has published well over a hundred papers in fields of physics from condensed matter, particle physics, plasmas and mathematical physics, and several in biological conservation. You can sign up for email updates here.
Larry Niven is the award-winning author of the Ringworld series, along with many other science fiction masterpieces and fantasy including the Magic Goes Away series. His Beowulf’s Children, co-authored with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes, was a New York Times bestseller. He has received the Nebula Award, five Hugos, four Locus Awards, two Ditmars, the Prometheus, and the Robert A. Heinlein Award, among other honors. He lives in Chatsworth, California. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Cast of Characters, Common Terms
Prologue: Alone with All These Voices
Chapter One: Waking
Chapter Two: Braking
Chapter Three: The Diaphanous
Chapter Four: Mice Among Elephants
Chapter Five: Helios Freehold
Chapter Six: Double Worlds
Chapter Seven: Gardening
Chapter Eight: Revivals
Chapter Nine: Glory Passing
Chapter Ten: Grappler
Chapter Eleven: Make Me Smarter
Chapter Twelve: Preparations
Chapter Thirteen: Backfire Dragons
Chapter Fourteen: Settling In
Chapter Fifteen: Twisty
Chapter Sixteen: Gas And Grav
Chapter Seventeen: Honor
Chapter Eighteen: Carniroos
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty: Hunter’s Breakfast
Chapter Twenty-One: Strands of Strangeness
Chapter Twenty-Two: Big Bright Shiny
Chapter Twenty-Three: Lumenstone
Chapter Twenty-Four: The Increate
Chapter Twenty-Five: Artilects
Chapter Twenty-Six: Into the Bulge
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Lands of Flight
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Skylife
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Bound for Glory
Chapter Thirty: The Hole Weapon
Chapter Thirty-One: Plunging
Chapter Thirty-Two: Fungal
Chapter Thirty-Three: Methaners
Chapter Thirty-Four: Animal Cunning
Chapter Thirty-Five: Blindfight
Chapter Thirty-Six: The Gravitational Wave Club
Chapter Thirty-Seven: A Furious, Fast Species
Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Rolling Zoo
Chapter Thirty-Nine: That Old Mind/Body Duality
Chapter Forty: Eternity’s Sunrise
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Books by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
About the Authors
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.
GLORIOUS
Copyright © 2020 by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
All rights reserved.
Interior art copyright © 2020 by Don Davis and Brenda Cox Giguere
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First Edition: 2020
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