Education Topics:

Programs

Activities

Resources

Contact Us

Black Holes: An Introductory Resource List

9. Some Science Fiction Stories with Good Science about Black Holes

Anderson, Poul "Kyrie" in Jerry Pournelle, ed. Black Holes. 1978, Fawcett. Explores the distortion of time near a black hole.

Asimov, Isaac "The Billiard Ball" in Asimov's Mysteries. 1968, Dell. Committing murder using general relativity.

Baxter, Stephen "Pilot" in Vacuum Diagrams. 1997, Harper Prism. An asteroid space ship being chased by an enemy missile goes through the ergosphere of a rotating black hole, taking energy out and making the chasing missile fall in the event horizon.

Benford, Gregory Eater. 2000, Eos/HarperCollins. An ancient intelligent black hole comes to our solar system.

Brin, David "The Crystal Spheres" in The River of Time. 1987, Bantam. Advanced races use black holes to bear with the loneliness of a universe in which life is still rare.

Brin, David Earth. 1990, Bantam. A mini black hole falls into the Earth's core.

Haldeman, Joe The Forever War. 1974, Ballantine. An interstellar war is fought using black holes for travel between battles.

Johnson, Bill "Meet Me at Apogee" in Carr, T., ed. The Best Science Fiction of the Year 12. 1983, Pocket Books. Posits a future in which people (with alien help) organize levels of descent near a black hole; so the two-month level is where one day of experienced time for the traveler equals two months in the outside universe. Prospectors and people with incurable disease hire pilots to take them down to lower levels.

Landis, Geoffrey "Impact Parameter" in Impact Parameter. 2001, Golden Gryphon. A newly discovered gravitational lens turns out to be a wormhole being used by an alien civilization to visit us.

Landis, Geoffrey "Approaching Perimelasma" in Impact Parameter. 2001, Golden Gryphon. In the far future, a virtual human is dropped into a black hole and makes an interesting discovery about space and time.

McAuley, Paul "How We Lost the Moon" in Crowther, Peter, ed. Moon Shots. 1999, Daw. A glitch in a fusion experiment on the Moon creates a mini black hole that eats our satellite.

McDevitt, Jack & Shara, Michael "Lighthouse" in Cryptic: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt. (2009, Subterranean Press) [also on the web at: http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1596061958/1596061958___8.htm ] An alien race decides, as a public service, to mark the location of unaccompanied black holes in the Galaxy by putting very strange brown dwarfs around them that could not exist in nature. Shara is an astronomer.

Niven, Larry World Out of Time. 1976, Ballantine. Protagonist uses a supermassive black hole to travel into distant future.

Niven, Larry "The Hole Man" in A Hole in Space. 1974, Ballantine. How to commit murder using a mini-black hole.

Niven, Larry "The Borderland of Sol" in Tales of Known Space. 1975, Ballantine. Space pirates use a mini-black hole.

Pohl, Fred Gateway. 1977, Ballantine. Enjoyable novel with rotating black holes, event horizons, and "black hole guilt". (Has a series of sequels where the science gets too "far out" for inclusion on this list.)

Sagan, Carl Contact. 1985, Simon & Schuster. The protagonists use a kind of black hole-wormhole "subway" system for interstellar travel. The system was designed by astrophysicist Kip Thorne and his students and later shown to be scientifically plausible.

Sheffield, Charles "Killing Vector" in Vectors. 1979, Ace. Mini-black holes are used for space propulsion. Sheffield has a PhD in physics.

Varley, John The Ophiuchi Hotline. 1977, Dell. Complex novel, in which mini black holes are hunted as energy sources.

Varley, John "The Black Hole Passes" in The Persistence of Vision. 1978, Dell. A mini-black hole threatens two deep space outposts.

Wheeler, J. Craig The Krone Experiment. 1986, Pressworks. Mini black holes pose a threat to the Earth; written by an astronomer.

Willis, Connie "Schwarzschild Radius" in Preiss, Byron & Fraknoi, Andrew, eds. The Universe. 1987, Bantam. Haunting story combining episodes from the life of Karl Schwarzschild and black hole images.

back to table of contents