What was that %$#@! book?
04-05-2018, 03:58 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-05-2018, 04:00 AM by classicdrogn.)
04-05-2018, 03:58 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-05-2018, 04:00 AM by classicdrogn.)
It's like a fic search thread, but for published novels you can only remember vague bits of.
The one that drove me to post this was (as almost always the case for me) sci-fi, with two main plot threads. One dealt with a human colony world that ran into difficulty when the previously quite earth-like conditions changed due to the sun suddenly dimming and dragging them off at relatively high acceleration, the other dealt with energy-being aliens who lived in stars discovering the joys of killin' and one of them setting a bunch of comfy stars up to fly off through space as a decoy while trying to pick out the one the killer was using and snipe it. Stuff happened, the colony got set up to survive an indeterminate length ice age and the viewpoint energy-being decided to lay low for a while until it was sure it'd gotten the psycho. Timeskip.
It's been a long time on the colony world, no one in living memory has seen the world like the old stories describe it or the stars as anything but a thin rainbow over the equator, until suddenly the rainbow spreads out again... then vanishes, nothing left but black. They have figured out that the planet-covering machinery on the local Mercury-equivalent seems to have been what was tapping the sun's energy and moving it along, but the rest of the universe vanishing is quite the shock, until somebody remembers time dilation and guesses that they may be into what is otherwise the heat-death of the universe.
This is so. The energy being is still around, vaguely dreaming of the happy energy-flush days of yore when stars were abundant and planetoids were more than dead lumps of inert matter pulled perfectly spherical by gravity over a long, long time of nothing happening to perturb them, and no energy to use except the occasional burst of radiation form proton decay(?). Then it notices something appear, remembers about those decoy suns soooo long ago, and realizes it inadvertently packed itself a lunch for this future and only wished it had sent more of them along, since a single sun's lifetime is so short. Still, good news for the moment, right? It moves in at the reappeared sun and looks around at what's on the planets it dragged along. Huh, there's the drive stuff, but what's all this?
It's my impression that the humans had just managed to open some kind of communication with the alien critter when the book ended, and I recall being annoyed that that was it, they didn't actually do anything. Does anyone recognize this, or know of a sequel/expansion? Some fan fiction, even? It may have been a novella or longish short story rather than a full book in its own right.
The one that drove me to post this was (as almost always the case for me) sci-fi, with two main plot threads. One dealt with a human colony world that ran into difficulty when the previously quite earth-like conditions changed due to the sun suddenly dimming and dragging them off at relatively high acceleration, the other dealt with energy-being aliens who lived in stars discovering the joys of killin' and one of them setting a bunch of comfy stars up to fly off through space as a decoy while trying to pick out the one the killer was using and snipe it. Stuff happened, the colony got set up to survive an indeterminate length ice age and the viewpoint energy-being decided to lay low for a while until it was sure it'd gotten the psycho. Timeskip.
It's been a long time on the colony world, no one in living memory has seen the world like the old stories describe it or the stars as anything but a thin rainbow over the equator, until suddenly the rainbow spreads out again... then vanishes, nothing left but black. They have figured out that the planet-covering machinery on the local Mercury-equivalent seems to have been what was tapping the sun's energy and moving it along, but the rest of the universe vanishing is quite the shock, until somebody remembers time dilation and guesses that they may be into what is otherwise the heat-death of the universe.
This is so. The energy being is still around, vaguely dreaming of the happy energy-flush days of yore when stars were abundant and planetoids were more than dead lumps of inert matter pulled perfectly spherical by gravity over a long, long time of nothing happening to perturb them, and no energy to use except the occasional burst of radiation form proton decay(?). Then it notices something appear, remembers about those decoy suns soooo long ago, and realizes it inadvertently packed itself a lunch for this future and only wished it had sent more of them along, since a single sun's lifetime is so short. Still, good news for the moment, right? It moves in at the reappeared sun and looks around at what's on the planets it dragged along. Huh, there's the drive stuff, but what's all this?
It's my impression that the humans had just managed to open some kind of communication with the alien critter when the book ended, and I recall being annoyed that that was it, they didn't actually do anything. Does anyone recognize this, or know of a sequel/expansion? Some fan fiction, even? It may have been a novella or longish short story rather than a full book in its own right.
--
‎noli esse culus
‎noli esse culus
