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  • (Meetpoint) Sunfall by C J Cherryh

    From jdnicoll@3:633/10 to All on Tue Sep 2 10:33:37 2025
    From Newsgroup: rec.arts.sf.written


    Sunfall by C J Cherryh

    The ancient sun is cooling but human drama persists.

    https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/red-sun
    --
    My reviews can be found at http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
    My tor pieces at https://www.tor.com/author/james-davis-nicoll/
    My Dreamwidth at https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/
    My patreon is at https://www.patreon.com/jamesdnicoll

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  • From William Hyde@3:633/10 to All on Tue Sep 2 15:27:21 2025
    James Nicoll wrote:
    Sunfall by C J Cherryh

    The ancient sun is cooling but human drama persists.

    https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/red-sun

    The reddening, cooling sun and colder earth goes back to Wells, does it not?

    Advances in astrophysics replaced this with a cinder, or puff of hot
    gas, but that doesn't make for great story material, so writers ignored
    it, as they ignored the very non-Burroughsian solar system when it
    suited them to do so.

    Leigh Brackett, for example, wrote a fairly realistic story set on Venus
    in the early 1950s, a Venus uninhabitably hot with a toxic atmosphere
    and huge surface pressure. But a few years later she wrote a story set
    on a Venus with oceans. And surely Zelazny knew that the Venus of "The
    doors of his face, the lamps of his mouth" could not exist.

    Brackett returned to the cold, dying, star and planet in "The Book of
    Skaith", while Wolfe, needing the imagery but unwilling perhaps to
    simply ignore the science, chose another route to get the image he wanted.

    William Hyde

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  • From Steve Coltrin@3:633/10 to All on Wed Sep 3 08:32:47 2025
    begin fnord
    William Hyde <wthyde1953@gmail.com> writes:

    The reddening, cooling sun and colder earth goes back to Wells, does it not?

    Did Wells have the sun getting larger, too? Been a long time since I
    read the Classic Comix version, which being the only Wells I ever read.
    --
    Steve Coltrin spcoltri@omcl.org
    "A group known as the League of Human Dignity helped arrange for Deuel
    to be driven to a local livestock scale, where he could be weighed."
    - Associated Press

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  • From Paul S Person@3:633/10 to All on Wed Sep 3 08:25:32 2025
    On Wed, 03 Sep 2025 08:32:47 -0600, Steve Coltrin <spcoltri@omcl.org>
    wrote:
    begin fnord
    William Hyde <wthyde1953@gmail.com> writes:

    The reddening, cooling sun and colder earth goes back to Wells, does it not?

    Did Wells have the sun getting larger, too? Been a long time since I
    read the Classic Comix version, which being the only Wells I ever read.
    Bing works!
    From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine>:
    The Morlocks open the Sphinx and use the machine as bait to capture
    the distraught Traveller, not understanding that he can use it to
    escape. He reattaches the levers before travelling further ahead to
    roughly 30 million years from his own time. There, he sees some of the
    last living things on a dying Earth: crab-like creatures wandering
    blood-red beaches chasing enormous butterflies, in a world covered in
    lichenoid vegetation. He continues to make jumps forward through time,
    seeing Earth's rotation cease and the sun grow larger, redder, and
    dimmer, and the world falling silent and freezing as the last living
    things die out.
    So I would say he had it getting larger, but not to the point it eats
    the earth. At least, not as far as he chooses to go.
    --
    "Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
    Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
    Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

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  • From Jerry Brown@3:633/10 to All on Wed Sep 3 16:32:37 2025
    On Wed, 03 Sep 2025 08:32:47 -0600, Steve Coltrin <spcoltri@omcl.org>
    wrote:

    begin fnord
    William Hyde <wthyde1953@gmail.com> writes:

    The reddening, cooling sun and colder earth goes back to Wells, does it not?

    Did Wells have the sun getting larger, too?

    At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome
    of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling
    heavens.

    H. G. Wells . The Time Machine (Kindle Locations 2086-2088). VP
    Classics. Kindle Edition.

    Been a long time since I
    read the Classic Comix version, which being the only Wells I ever read.
    --
    Jerry Brown

    A cat may look at a king
    (but probably won't bother)

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  • From Christian Weisgerber@3:633/10 to All on Wed Sep 3 18:01:38 2025
    On 2025-09-03, Paul S Person <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

    From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine>:

    So I would say he had it getting larger, but not to the point it eats
    the earth. At least, not as far as he chooses to go.

    H. G. Wells' speculation about the future of the sun was severely
    constrained by the fact that at the time he published _The Time Machine_
    (1895) the source of stellar energy was not understood, much less
    stellar evolution. It would take until 1920 for Arthur Eddington
    to propose nuclear fusion processes.
    --
    Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de

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  • From Paul S Person@3:633/10 to All on Thu Sep 4 07:59:40 2025
    On Wed, 3 Sep 2025 18:01:38 -0000 (UTC), Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote:
    On 2025-09-03, Paul S Person <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

    From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine>:

    So I would say he had it getting larger, but not to the point it eats
    the earth. At least, not as far as he chooses to go.

    H. G. Wells' speculation about the future of the sun was severely
    constrained by the fact that at the time he published _The Time Machine_ >(1895) the source of stellar energy was not understood, much less
    stellar evolution. It would take until 1920 for Arthur Eddington
    to propose nuclear fusion processes.
    Or he just chose not to let his hero go far enough into the future.
    --
    "Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
    Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
    Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"

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