And while I am at it

[james_davis_nicoll]

Consider glancing through some stellar databases if you are going to set a story in a stellar system near Sol rather making up a star and plunking it down near the solar system. I'm more forgiving if this involves a red dwarf or a brown dwarf - Yes, I know it's questionable to call brown dwarf stars but I am lumping them into the set of all large bodies warm enough for us to heat ourselves by - but the cases I am thinking of involve bright stars of the kind we are unlikely to have overlooked.

Barlowe's 1990 Expedition: Being an Account in Words and Artwork of the 2358 A.D. Voyage to Darwin IV is the worst offender that comes to mind: it is set in a non-existant system six and a half light years from the Sun. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the nearer stars knows what stars are that close to the Sun and none of the four stars in question match Darwin IV's star. It's as silly as a National Geographic-funded expedition to a previously uncharted island-continent in the Grand Banks..

Comments

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Maybe barlowe knew that in the future we would discover a new law of physics which makes it all make sense?

(Is that the one with the lighter than air cavemen that got made into that quite good CGI based astrobiology series on Discovery?)

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the one, though I think it was just one two-hour documentary. I haven't read the book, so I don't know how faithful the documentary is; there's a lot of stuff in it that prima facie does not make a lot of sense, and my favorite parts are the real-life biologists and so forth looking at the CG footage and saying things like 'Well, I have no idea how that's happening, so the underlying cause must be really interesting'.