Speakeasy: Science fiction has always been fascinated by the sun

Of course, fears of the sun going nova are equally misplaced. Our star will reach its maximum girth in 7.6 billion years, when its corona will cross the orbit of the earth. However, fears of the earth being engulfed and vanishing in a puff of superheated dust may be overrated. Because the sun will power its expansion by burning up its matter, and, therefore, its gravitational pull should decrease, allowing the earth to spiral off to cooler climes.

But science fiction, even when it is written by scientists, has ways of getting around these inconveniences. In Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter’s 2005 novel Sunstorm, a pulse of energy from the sun wrecks all the electronic hardware on earth, just like a neutron bomb. It is but the rumble of the volcano about to explode, and presages a gigantic solar eruption which mathematical models predict for 2042 (in the story, not in reality). And this whole shebang was apparently set in motion by the first sentient species in known space, which is determined not to take any competition from spacefaring humans, and bombed the sun with a planet the size of a gas giant in a pre-emptive strike millennia ago.

The aliens constitute the fictional part of science fiction, but reality does not require such intelligent intervention. The sun routinely suffers drivebys by comets, which skim through its corona and sometimes fly apart. One of them falling into the sun is not wholly inconceivable. In 1994, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter, though astronomers had not believed that such violent events could occur in our neighbourhood in space on a human timescale. The sun presents a bigger target, and has a bigger gravity well to funnel in the stuff flying loose in the universe.

An entire class of science fiction depicts sunsails — spacecraft propelled by the solar wind, caught in huge, gossamer-thin metal sails which were theoretically impossible when these stories were written, but are conceivable now, after the synthesis of carbon nanofibres. Perhaps, the most imaginative use of sunsails was Larry Niven’s innovation of stage trees and starseeds in a series of short stories. These were life forms propagating themselves on an interstellar scale.

The trees grew to massive heights and created a solid fuel core, effectively becoming living rockets. When they were ignited by forest fires, they propelled their seeds into orbit. There, they set off on journeys of their own in search of hospitable planets, deploying vast sails to catch the solar wind, which propelled them out of the solar system at enormous speeds.

Life itself is the one mystery that solar probes are unlikely to dispel. Stanislaw Lem dreamt of a sentient ocean in Solaris, but Olaf Stapledon saw the sun as the home of life in The Flames. Arthur C Clarke, too, experimented with the notion in Out of the Sun. But strangely, science fiction and fantasy have not considered the gods much. From the Egyptian Ra, the Vedic Surya and the Munda Singbonga, right down to the Belenos that Asterix and Obelix swear by, the mythology of almost all cultures is dominated by a sun god. It is surprising that this notion of the godhood of the sun is almost unknown in the science fiction universe. Especially since a lot of science fiction is a quest for the unknown and the unknowable, the body of hidden knowledge that, for want of a better word, humans refer to as god.

Pratik Kanjilal lectures a surprisingly tolerant public on far too many issues.