Sun in fiction

The Sun received comparatively little specific attention in early science fiction; prior to the late 1800s, when Mars became the most popular celestial object in fiction, the Sun was a distant second to the Moon. A large proportion of the works that nevertheless did focus on the Sun portrayed it as having inhabitants. In Lucian of Samosata's work A True Story from the second century CE, described by science fiction scholar Gary Westfahl as the first depiction of space travel in fiction, the inhabitants of the Sun are at war with those of the Moon. and Cyrano de Bergerac's posthumously published 1662 novel ''. In the 1700s, solar inhabitants were depicted by French authors , whose 1750 novel Relation du Monde de Mercure describes them ruling over the inhabitants of Mercury, and Marie-Anne de Roumier-Robert, whose 1765 novel Voyage de Milord Céton dans les sept planètes'' portrays a society on the Sun characterized by equality of the sexes. The concept of the plurality of worlds—the notion that other heavenly bodies should be essentially Earth-like and therefore habitable—endured in fiction with regard to the Sun well into the 1800s. and the titular creatures of Olaf Stapledon's 1947 novel The Flames are lizard-like solar beings residing inside igneous rocks on Earth. Arthur C. Clarke's 1958 short story "Out of the Sun" features life "formed of tangles of magnetic flux on the surface of our Sun", and Edmond Hamilton's 1962 short story "Sunfire!" depicts an energy-based lifeform living in the Sun's corona. == Disaster ==

The Sun has been a source of destruction or the threat thereof in many stories, most commonly either by fading or exploding. 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. while the time traveller in Wells's 1895 novel The Time Machine discovers a cooled and reddened Sun over a barren Earth in the far future. Similarly, stories about the end of the world involving the death of the Sun were written in the early 1900s by among others George C. Wallis, whose 1901 short story "The Last Days of Earth" depicts the last survivors leaving a frozen Earth for a potentially habitable planet in another planetary system, and William Hope Hodgson, whose 1908 novel The House on the Borderland describes one character's vision of the destruction of both the Earth and Sun. By the 1920s, the combustion hypothesis had fallen out of favour. The new explanation was that the Sun was fuelled by nuclear fusion, an understanding that was pioneered by the work of astrophysicist Arthur Eddington. Stories depicting the Sun waning nevertheless kept appearing, such as Clark Ashton Smith's stories about the fictional future continent Zothique starting with the 1932 short story "The Empire of the Necromancers", Nat Schachner's 1934 short story "When the Sun Dies" describes the entire Earth freezing over in the 1980s as a result of a reduction in solar activity, and in Arthur C. Clarke's 1949 short story "History Lesson", future Venusians find humanity extinct due to the environmental changes brought about by the Sun fading. Clarke also touched upon the subject in the 1938 poem "The Twilight of the Sun" and the 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise. Edmond Hamilton's 1934 short story "Thundering Worlds" sees all the planets leaving the Solar System to find a new star as the Sun dies, while his 1963 comic book story "Superman Under the Red Sun" depicts Superman travelling into the far future and losing his superpowers as a result of the aging red Sun. In the 2019 film The Wandering Earth, the death of the Sun prompts humanity to relocate the entire Earth to a new planetary system. In Gene Wolfe's 1980–1983 four-volume novel The Book of the New Sun and its sequels, a white hole is used to reinvigorate the dying Sun. The concept of using an explosive device for this purpose is also explored in the 2007 film Sunshine. Exploding Several stories depict the Sun exploding, or "going nova". Hugh Kingsmill's 1924 short story also entitled "The End of the World" instead focuses on the anticipation of the destruction of the Earth. In John W. Campbell's 1930 short story "The Voice of the Void" humanity leaves Earth ahead of this disaster, while in 's 1931 short story "Dramatis Personae" the Sun explodes without warning, leaving a few people already in spaceships as the only survivors. In Arthur C. Clarke's 1946 short story "Rescue Party", aliens come to Earth to save humanity from the violent demise of the Sun only to find that evacuation has already been undertaken, whereas in his 1954 short story "No Morning After", the aliens' warning goes unheeded. J. T. McIntosh's 1954 novel One in Three Hundred deals with the allocation of the limited capacity aboard the evacuating spaceships. The Sun exploding occasionally appears as a background event to explain why humanity has abandoned Earth in favour of colonizing the cosmos, one example being Theodore Sturgeon's 1956 short story "The Skills of Xanadu". In Norman Spinrad's 1966 novel The Solarians, the Sun is intentionally made to explode in an act of interstellar warfare, In Edward Wellen's 1971 novel Hijack, the Mafia is duped into abandoning Earth by being misled that the Sun will turn into a nova. 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. It is now recognized that the Sun cannot explode in this manner as the necessary stellar conditions are not met. Other The heat of the Sun dooms life on Earth when the Earth's orbit is disrupted in John Hawkins's 1938 short story "Ark of Fire", the 1961 film The Day the Earth Caught Fire, and the 1961 episode "The Midnight Sun" of the television show The Twilight Zone. More fancifully, Clare Winger Harris's 1928 short story "The Menace of Mars" depicts an increase in heat from the Sun threatening the Earth as a result of a general cosmological change in the properties of the universe, which leads Mars to adjust Earth's orbit to serve as a shield against the Sun's radiation. , a type of solar storm Solar storms such as solar flares appear in some stories. 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, 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. More long-lasting changes in solar output appear in 's 1932 short story "50th Century Revolt", where an increase in solar activity forces humanity to slow the rotation of the Earth to a synchronous rotation—where the same side of the Earth faces the Sun at all times, thus protecting the other half of the planet from the scorching heat—for two millennia until the Sun dims again, and George O. Smith's 1953 novel Troubled Star, where aliens seek to turn the Sun into a variable star. == Properties and phenomena ==

Orbital mechanics (Gor). The two planets are always hidden from each other's view by the Sun. In reality, this orbital arrangement would not be stable. This Counter-Earth is inhabited by counterparts of the people of Earth in the 1969 film Doppelgänger ( Journey to the Far Side of the Sun) and by a society of women in the 1950s comic strip Twin Earths. The 1972 anthology The Day the Sun Stood Still contains three different short stories (by Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, and Gordon R. Dickson) where the Sun stops in the sky as in the biblical Book of Joshua. Power source The energy output of the Sun was harnessed for power production in fiction as early as Hugo Gernsback's 1911 novel Ralph 124C 41+ and in several stories since, with Robert A. Heinlein's 1940 short story "Let There Be Light" describing economically viable solar panels and Isaac Asimov's 1941 short story "Reason" (later included in the 1950 fix-up novel I, Robot) depicting solar power produced in space but consumed on Earth. Other works have depicted solar arrays in close orbits around the Sun itself; The idea was popular in 1960s science fiction, appearing among others in Jack Vance's 1962 short story "Gateway to Strangeness" and Cordwainer Smith's 1963 short story "Think Blue, Count Two". Robert A. Heinlein had earlier written about a proto-variation on the concept using an inertialess drive. 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". H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel ''King Solomon's Mines originally featured a solar eclipse in this manner, though later editions substituted a lunar eclipse to address the issue of the event having a several-hour duration, whereas solar eclipses last for a maximum of a few minutes. The 1961 film Barabbas'' portrays the crucifixion darkness during the biblical crucifixion of Jesus as a solar eclipse, and the scene was filmed during the solar eclipse of February 15, 1961. 's 1946 novel The Sun Queen is set on a sunspot, where two humans from Earth encounter two factions at war. In science fiction horror films, sunspots are occasionally invoked as the cause of various types of abnormal phenomena such as zombies and mass delusions. == Close encounters ==

The Sun appears as a hazard to spaceships that approach it too closely in some stories. Willy Ley's 1937 short story "At the Perihelion" involves a close approach to the Sun as part of an escape from Mars, and Charles L. Harness's 1949 novel The Paradox Men ( Flight into Yesterday) is a space opera that climaxes with a swordfight atop a space station on the surface of the Sun. 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. A fleet of near-Sun spacecraft that modulate the solar output for weather control purposes appears in Theodore L. Thomas's 1962 short story "The Weather Man". David Brin's 1980 novel Sundiver revolves around a hard science fiction journey into the Sun. == Sentient ==

'', an early science fiction film by Georges Méliès Some works depict the Sun as being sentient. According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, this is more commonly applied to other stars; in Olaf Stapledon's 1937 novel Star Maker, all stars are sentient, and in Diana Wynne Jones's 1975 novel Dogsbody, both the Sun and Sirius are sentient. In Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund's 1977 novel If the Stars are Gods, aliens come to the Solar System to communicate with the Sun. 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. The Sun is likewise female in Alasdair Gray's 1983 short story "The Problem", and concerned with her spots. == See also ==