Black holes in fiction

Stellar and Astrophysical Black Holes

Prepared by NASA for a hypothetical neutron binary, this representation resembles (over an extended period and in two dimensions) a brief burst of gravity waves from a black hole as a massive space liner plunges into it.

• "He Fell into a Dark Hole" (1973): a short story by Jerry Pournelle originally published in Analog science fiction magazine. Ships are mysteriously disappearing on the direct "Alderson" (hyperspace) path from the planet Meiji in the 82 Eridani system to the Earth.^[14] In Pournelle's future history, the CoDominium authority discourages scientific research; only renegade physicist Marie Ward remembers the old idea of black holes, and she theorizes that a stellar black hole is causing passing vessels to drop out of hyperspace and trapping them in its gravity well (for an instance of a quantum black hole precipitating ships out of hyperspace, see "The Borderland of Sol" by Larry Niven, below). Captain Bartholomew Ramsey commands a likely-to-be suicidal mission along the fateful trajectory to test the theory, and finds it all too true and himself with his own craft trapped right alongside the damaged missing ships. Following a hunch of Ward, a heroic officer (and Ramsey's romantic rival) volunteers to pilot the most spaceworthy of the hulks straight into the hole, to unleash a torrent of powerful gravity waves (see graphic). By turning on its short-lived Alderson drive at the precisely calculated moment of impact, Ramsey's ship is able to surf out of the well and return to 82 Eridani.
• "A World Out of Time" (1976): a Larry Niven novel set in the State universe. Jerome Corbell uses a spacecraft travelling at nearly lightspeed to perform a slingshot around the supermassive black hole at the galactic center; relativistic time dilation due to the pass close to the event horizon causes him to emerge from the maneuver over three million years later.
• Gateway (1977): the multiple award-winning^[15][16] first novel in the Heechee Saga by Frederik Pohl. Protagonist Robinette Stetley Broadhead signs on to a ten-person crew that is flying in a pair of ill-understood starships (two of a fleet abandoned to the Solar System by a vanished alien race),^[17] and voyaging to a frighteningly unknown—but potentially rewarding—destination. Upon arriving there, they all fall into the clutches of a stellar-mass black hole; through a series of mishaps Broadhead escapes and returns home to fame and fortune while the other nine plunge, over the span of an objective time-dilated eternity, into the hole. The novel explores both the incident itself and Broadhead's resulting feelings of guilt. In later installments of the saga, the Heechee emerge from their retreat in the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, having—again because of time dilation—spent only a few subjective centuries there; they and the humans resolve to confront The Foe together.

The ergosphere of a rotating black hole accelerates objects within its envelope, extracting energy from the hole.

• "Singularity" (1978): a short story by Mildred Downey Broxon. A scientific team monitors the last days of the intelligent but radically alien tribes of Epsilon Eridani's second planet, Mancken's World, as a wandering stellar black hole finds its way through the star's planetary system. The hole makes a feast of the gas giant fifth planet but passes nowhere near Mancken's; however on its close encounter with ε Eridani itself, it will raise a storm of huge planet-scouring flares. The autochthones, whose prescient mythology has left them not unprepared for the event, calmly await the apocalypse along with a lone abandoned—and fearful—human observer.^[18]
• "Schwarzschild Radius" (1987) short story by Connie Willis^[19] features Karl Schwarzschild's life, using imagery from black hole physics.
• Beyond the Fall of Night (1990): the sequel by Gregory Benford to Arthur C. Clarke's earlier work Against the Fall of Night. The sequel is very different in tone and theme from its inspiration, and ignores Clarke's own revision The City and the Stars (see above).^[7] In it Benford explicitly renames the Singularity that imprisons the Mad Mind, from Clarke's Black Sun (at the edge of the galaxy) to the Black Hole (a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy).^[20] Benford reworked the same theme yet a third time in an expansion of the novel as Beyond Infinity (2004, ISBN 0-446-53059-X)^[21] wherein the protagonist Alvin of Loronei, a "Unique," is replaced by the young woman Cley, an "Original"; the Black Hole becomes the black hole; and the Mad Mind becomes the Malign. In the 2004 novel, the cover art of the hardcover edition features a SMBH with a prominent polar jet, at the hub of a spiral galaxy.
• Flies from the Amber (1995) by Wil McCarthy^[22] features colonists in a stellar system that incorporates a black hole discovering aliens that have been trapped near the event horizon due to gravitational time dilation.
• "Approaching Perimelasma" (1998), short story by Geoffrey A. Landis, originally in Asimov's Science Fiction, features an ultra-miniature spaceship making a voyage to drop through the event horizon of a black hole.
• "The Planck Dive" (1998), short story by Greg Egan , coincidentally published just a month after the Landis story with a similar theme, also features a drop through the event horizon of a black hole.

Miniature Black Holes

In 1971, Hawking introduced the idea that black holes may exist that are smaller than stellar mass,^[23] "micro black holes", possibly formed as primordial black holes during the high-density phase of the big bang. Some stories refer to these as "quantum black holes," distinguishing them from astrophysical black holes. In 1975, Hawking pointed out that such small holes would evaporate due to the emission of Hawking radiation.^[24]

In the stories that follow, a common plot device is that of the escaped black hole that oscillates back and forth through the core of an astronomical body and, most often, eventually consumes it: Mars in "The Hole Man" by Larry Niven (1973), an asteroid in "The Borderland of Sol" by Niven (1975), the Earth in Hyperion by Dan Simmons (1989), Earth by David Brin (1990) and The Krone Experiment by J. Craig Wheeler (1986), the Moon in "How We Lost the Moon, a True Story by Frank W. Allen" by Paul J. McAuley (1999), and the Earth once more in Olympos by Simmons (2005). Surprisingly, given the widely publicized 1975 publication by Stephen Hawking of the theory of quantum evaporation, few of the works incorporate this idea (notably Earth by David Brin (1990) and Olympos by Dan Simmons (2005)). While the rapid evaporation of the smallest quantum black holes does not rule out such a catastrophe, other physical aspects of the collapse scenario remain problematic.^{[note 2]}

On the other hand, the allied notion of deploying quantum black holes that are so small as to be maneuverable for use as offensive weapons in crime or warfare (see "The Borderland of Sol" by Larry Niven (1975) and Chaos and Order: The Gap Into Madness (1994) by Stephen R. Donaldson) is dealt a real blow by their presumably brief lifetimes.

• "The Hole Man" (1973): a short story written by Larry Niven and published in Analog science fiction magazine. "One day Mars will be gone." Thus begins the Hugo Award winning (1975) tale of an electromagnetically confined quantum black hole, the resonator of an ancient gravity-wave communicator discovered on a voyage of exploration to Mars.^{[note 3]} A disgruntled and possibly psychotic mission scientist (the eponymous hole man) "accidentally" turns off the containment field at the perfect moment to murder the expedition's martinet captain, with the unconstrained singularity dropping through his body on its way to the planetary center of mass. Massing 100 billion kg, with a diameter of 0.1 fm (about a sixteenth the size of a proton^[25]) the object encounters no resistance as it plunges through flesh and stone alike, too small to encounter and consume many subatomic particles, but leaving behind a channel of millimeter-scale havoc arising from the enormous tidal forces in its nanoscale neighborhood. Still, the hole will grow. The astrophysicist explains: Remember that it absorbs everything it comes near, a nucleus here, an electron there ... and it's not just waiting for atoms to fall into it. Its gravity is ferocious, and it's falling back and forth, through the center of the planet, sweeping up mass. The more it eats, the bigger it gets ... sooner or later [in 40 years], it'll absorb Mars.^{[26][note 2]}
• "The Borderland of Sol" (1975): a Known Space novelette by Larry Niven published in Analog science fiction magazine. Lovesick Jinxian physicist Dr. Julian Forward has turned space pirate, using a charged quantum black hole, electrostatically steered by a trio of space tugs, to winkle interstellar transports out of hyperspace in the desolate trans-Neptunian reaches of the Solar System. When Beowulf Schaeffer's ship is attacked, its hyperdrive motor suddenly disappearing, he and genius Carlos Wu find themselves prisoners in Forward's secret asteroid base even as the mad scientist plots yet another assault. Using ingenuity and dexterity, with covert logistical backup from Earth agent Sigmund Ausfaller, the two foil the ambush; the ravenous vortex of the hole escapes confinement and settles slowly—a deadly, lazily drifting actinic pinpoint—through Forward's control room. Forward loses his frantic resisting grip on a control panel, falls into the tiny maelstrom, and is consumed in a flash of light; within minutes the entire asteroid crumples in on itself and is as spectacularly annihilated. Meanwhile, the protagonists escape in the nick of time on Ausfaller's ship.^[28]
• The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977) by John Varley: micro black holes are harvested in the Oort cloud and used to produce energy.
  • "The Black Hole Passes" (1980), short story by John Varley (in The Persistence of Vision, 1978), in the same setting as The Ophiuchi Hotline. A space station outpost in the Oort cloud attempts to capture a passing black hole, which turns out to be intelligent.
• "Killing Vector" (1978): a short story by Charles Sheffield; the first of his "McAndrew Chronicles" series of stories. The title refers to the Killing vector, named after German mathematician Wilhelm Killing, a vector field employed in the relativistic theory of black holes.^{[note 4]} In a tale in which black holes are used as a power source, the mass murderer Yifter is being conveyed from Earth orbit to the Titan penal colony on a modular ship consisting of multiple independent spherical Sections, each drawing power from the ergosphere (see graphic) of its own rapidly rotating quantum hole, or "kernel" (a neologism for "Kerr-Newmann black hole"), the whole assembly being electromagnetically bound together. Yifter is freed in a deep-space raid by his henchmen, but is tricked into making his getaway in Section Seven, whose kernel has been experimentally stripped of its Killing vector field and thereby exposed as a naked singularity; as soon as he taps the ergosphere he is flung into another dimension.^[27]
• "The Nothing Spot" (1978): a short story by Dan Girard. Future housewife Cheryl Harbottle is dismayed to discover that, in her new decorator lamp ("Capture the Sun in Your Living Room"), the microscopic solar lighting element has collapsed into a microscopic black hole, which consumes just about anything she experimentally feeds into it. After losing her Komfy Kushion chair she begins to get really scared until, ever resourceful, she conceives the idea of cordoning off the nothing spot's corner with some tasteful drapes and discontinues her rubbish disposal service.^[29]
• Star Bright (1980): a novel by Martin Caidin. A nuclear fusion experiment gone awry leads to the creation of an object that has all the properties of a quantum black hole, although it is not called that in the novel. There is a large explosion, consistent with the energy released by the total evaporation of a singularity via Hawking radiation, and a wide area is devastated.^[30]
• The Doomsday Effect (1986): a novel by Thomas Thurston Thomas, a.k.a. Thomas Wren. A tiny black hole falls into the Earth, and begins an elliptical orbit through it, consuming it as it goes. Scientists labor to figure out how to stop it. But how do you stop something that is smaller than an atom, heavier than a mountain, and swallows everything that touches it? Winner of the Compton Crook Award in 1987.^[31]
• Hyperion (1989): a novel by Dan Simmons. In the far future, Earth is only a memory. In "The Poet's Tale" Martin Selenius, author of the fictional epic poem The Hyperion Cantos, reminisces about his land-poor aristocratic upbringing on Earth in the time of the Big Mistake, enjoying "periods of remission"—stretches of ten to eighteen quiet months between planet-wide spasms as the Kiev Team's goddamn little black hole digested bits of the Earth's center and waited for its next feast ... The devastation was great during the Bad Times—and these came more often in precisely plotted spasms ...^[32] (for a similar catastrophe on the planet Mars, see The Hole Man by Larry Niven, above).
• Earth (1990): a novel written by David Brin. The plot of the book involves an artificial quantum black hole which has been lost in the Earth's interior and the attempts to recover it before it destroys the planet (for a similar catastrophe on the planet Mars, see The Hole Man by Larry Niven, above). In the novel, the characters ask where the hole came from: How could anybody build and conceal a black hole, for heaven’s sake—even a micro black hole—in space without word getting out? The smallest hole with a Hawking radiation temperature low enough to be contained would need the mass of a midget mountain. You don’t go hauling that kind of material into low earth orbit without someone noticing.^[33]

The Moon, in the last throes of its collapse into an interior black hole.

• "How We Lost the Moon, a True Story by Frank W. Allen" (1999), short story by Paul J. McAuley, published in the collection Little Machines. A quantum black hole is accidentally created on the moon and gradually consumes it (see graphic; for a similar catastrophe on the planet Mars, see The Hole Man by Larry Niven, above).^[34]
• Ilium (2003) and Olympos (2005), linked pair of novels by Dan Simmons. In this duology, one of the story's multiple threads is played out in Paris Crater—a future metropolis rebuilt on the ruins of the former French capital … Paris Crater was said to have gained its crater more than two millennia ago when post-humans lost control of a tiny black hole they’d created during a demonstration at a place called the Institut de France. The hole had bored its way through the center of the earth several times but the only crater it had left in the planet’s surface was right here between the Invalids Hotel faxnode and the Guarded Lion node.^[35] The hole evaporated with an enormous release of energy.^{[note 5]}
• Chaos and Order (1994), fourth book of The Gap Cycle^[36] by Stephen R. Donaldson. Sometime pirate captain Angus Thermopyle heads his vessel, the Trumpet, for an illegal lab hidden deep in a chaotic asteroid belt. ... she carried singularity grenades; devices at once so dangerous and so difficult to use that Morn’s instructors in the Academy had dismissed their value in actual combat … Without external energies to feed it, the singularity was so tiny that it consumed itself and winked away before it could do any damage.^[37] Here Donaldson recognizes the brief lifetime of sufficiently small quantum singularities, but he greatly understates the energy they produce when they "wink away"^{[note 5]}—a release of energy that would actually serve as a far more effective weapon than the highly localized "appetite" of a tiny black hole.

Black Holes as Wormhole Bridges

Many early stories about black holes incorporate the concept that a black hole may contain a wormhole (known earlier as an "Einstein-Rosen bridge")^[38] that could be used for transportation; a concept that was at one time considered plausible, but is not currently accepted. More on wormholes can be found in the wormholes in fiction article.

• The Forever War (1974), novel by Joe Haldeman. In this novel, humanity has discovered collapsars throughout the galaxy, and used them to colonise it. Spaceships and troops are also transported via the collapsars to wage war against an alien species. Due to time dilation, these trips are subjectively very brief, but decades or centuries pass elsewhere. The difficulties the troops face in reintegrating to a vastly changed society after returning from a campaign is a key theme.
• "Singularities Make Me Nervous," (1974), a short story by Larry Niven.^[39] A rotating black hole as a time machine. "A hole into another universe, maybe, or into another part of this one, maybe. That's in the equations too. And there's a path around a rotating black hole that brings you back to your starting point without even going through the singularity. Which sounds harmless enough until you realize you're talking about event-points—points in space time."
• "Fountain of Force" (1978): a short story written by Grant Carrington and George Zebrowski. Black holes, linked via wormholes to distant corresponding white holes, form the foundation of an instantaneous travel network that spans the galaxy. The story concerns the inadvertent discovery of an especially large black hole that provides a link to the Andromeda galaxy.^[40]
• The Gates of Heaven (1980): a novel by Paul Preuss. In the near future, an expedition attempts to rescue the survivors of the first accidental interstellar journey. Passage through the null-tide region between a pair of black holes is actually a gateway to another star system. A sequel, Re-entry, is set centuries in the future. A government agent tracks down a fugitive who has discovered how to use the black hole gateways to travel back in time and possibly undo history. (In the end, the gateways don't merely link different points light-years apart in the universe, but they actually connect different indistinguishable universes in a multiverse.)^[41]
• Better Than Life (1990), novel written by Grant Naylor, features the crew of Red Dwarf encountering a black hole, nearly sucking them in to their demise, which they manage to escape from utilizing black hole physics devised by the freshly genius Holly and retained by a talking toaster (but still have to briefly go through "spaghettification" - merging them into strands of shared consciousness). The resultant time dilation separates them from the marooned Dave Lister for 37 years, making him too weak to survive a Polymoprh attack. The crew are able to resurrect him by traveling back through the black hole to a region called the omni-zone, which allows for travel into six parallel universes, including one where time runs backwards. This serves as the background for both alternative sequels, written by Doug Naylor and Rob Grant respectively, called Last Human (1995) and Backwards (1996). The omni-zone plays a more vital role in the former, as it features numerous effects of interchange through the black hole between universes.