YASID

[james_davis_nicoll]

Does anyone remember an SF novel from the 1980s about interstellar entities who noticed that occasionally star systems would start emitting annoying radio noise that would go away if the entities just turned the stars off for a bit?

Comments

[dragoness_e]

Sounds a little bit like Steven Baxter's Xylee Cycle, wherein the dark matter Photino Birds disliked unstable stars that did things like leave the main sequence and supernova--so they started aging all the stars to nice stable white dwarfs and red dwarfs. The normal matter inhabitants of the universe disagreed with this...

[jreynolds197]

Sounds similar to Pohl's The World at the End of Time (1990), although shutting suns off (or at least diverting some of their power to providing thrust) was a side-effect. Plenty of suns going nova, all because of some arsehole stellar inhabitants playing murderous games with each other.

IIRC, the stellar inhabitants never noticed the life on the rocky planets, though.

[(Anonymous)]

TvTropes has a page for Invisible Aliens [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InvisibleAliens], and the Literature tab lists several works, which are not quite matches, but might help shake loose memories.

[Memetic Hazard glyph: TVTROPES]

[arethinn]

IHNJ, IJLS "Memetic Hazard glyph".