Astronomy in Science Fiction: “Lobsters” by Charlie Stross

March 15th, 2009

First, I’m not picking on Charlie Stross particularly.   It’s just that I’d been meaning to read his work for many years now, and finally got the chance with the purchase of a Kindle.   In addition to a couple of his novels, I downloaded his award-nominated story “Lobsters” that I recall hearing many great things about.

It is an interesting story, which I enjoyed reading, and I think it would have blown me away when it first came out.   Unfortunately it’s a case of being so good that you set the standard and then the original stuff doesn’t look so original in hindsight.   Happened to Tolkien and Gibson, so Stross is in good company.

Anyway, I found this sentence regarding dark matter:

“They even found the dark matter–MACHOs, big brown dwarves in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared–suspiciously high entropy leakage.”

There’s some stuff about most of Andromeda being sapient and I take it that this issue has a lot to do with the related stories that together make up Accelerando, which I have not read.

The sentence stopped me cold, however, and would have stopped me cold earlier this decade when the story came out.

In the 1990s there was a project, called the MACHO project, searching for the hypothesized MAssive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs) that might constitute the dark matter.   Things like red dwarf stars, or maybe black holes.   They found some, but far from enough.   The vast majority of dark matter is not baryonic (normal matter found on the periodic table) and is not in MACHOs or red dwarf stars (see my primer on the current state of knowledge on dark matter, which was good in 2000 but has advanced even more since).

Now, it does take some time for information to percolate from the scientists to the science fiction writers and the general public, but the study was clearly taking place and Stross knew about the concept of MACHOs so I imagine he knew something about the project.

It just strikes me as ironic that someone who has issues with writing the near-future because of the fast-changing technology could blow it on something that was already known at the time.

For me, getting the science right is critically important.   One aspect is educational.   I don’t know how many sf readers think that dark matter is made up of halo red dwarf stars, but I suspect some do.   The other is just the suspension of disbelief.   While it is not unacceptable to write about the near-future and have it regarded as alternate history to future readers (see The Watchmen for an example, or most of Tom Clancy’s work), saying something that is just astronomically wrong is always going to throw me out of a story, and hopefully any astronomy students I’ve taught as well.

Anyway, take this as an interesting observation of the day, an excuse to go read or reread “Lobsters,” and to check out the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers before applications close.

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