I bit the bullet and purchased the book, thrilled for the
space opera adventure I was about to become lost in, where the heroes would
save humanity across a vast galactic setting. Halfway through chapter two I
started to get that uneasy feeling that I was not going to get to experience a
vista of new worlds.
The planets were very earthlike…so much so that I could see
the major cities being nothing more than the capital cities of earth. The more
“exotic” planets where some of the action took place reminded me of well
basically earth with a patina washed over them.
Okay, I admit that most of us who write science fiction are
not theoretical physicist or cosmologist, but one need not be. There is a plethora of information everyday
about the discovery of a new exo-planet.
According to NASA; http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/
Current Exoplanet Archive Holdings
889 Planets around 688 Stars
134 Systems with Multiple Planets
3,548 Kepler Candidates and Confirmed Planets
3,097,904 Transit Survey Light Curves
Date of last update of KOI table: 2013-07-31
There are 889 planets orbiting 688 stars. That is a lot of
story ideas, from first contact to last messages from dying worlds. It is not
just the amount of extra solar planets, but planets in science fiction are terrestrial
planets orbiting yellow stars. But as we have seen there are literally hundreds
of planets of various types; terrestrial, super-terrestrial, Jovian worlds both
cold and hot, water worlds, and ice worlds.
There are planets with methane oceans
and others with heavy gravity or lighter gravity, planets with dense
atmospheres whose greenhouse effects are on scales greater than we seen on
Venus.
The current science-fiction story I am working on takes
place on several planets, but with the discovery of so many varied and unusual
exo-planets I am reconsidering how bland my aliens are, and how utterly earth-like
their worlds are, how I have limited myself in developing my worlds based on
outdated concepts of worlds. Limited my possibilities of life and how it may have
develop on those planets.
Recently I spoke with my dad about the amazing things that
we are discovering every day in the universe and many of our assumptions of
what planets should be are being tweaked with every new discovery. Take for instance GJ 504b, it is four times
the mass of Jupiter. And even cooler it is a pink sphere. Yep, you read that
right, pink. And this planet is throwing many of the ideas scientist had about
how planets developed out the window.
If we are finding these amazing planets out in the real
universe, should we not provide our readers that same awe in our stories?
Worlds of wonder. Indeed.
