A bit tangential, but here we go. A place where there's daytime all the time, except every once in a while is quite close to us. It's the Moon. If you live on the near side of the Moon, then you always see the Earth hanging there in the sky in the same spot every day. It does not rise and it does not set, it just stays in place. But it goes through phases. New Earth, Crescent Earth, Half Earth, etc. The Sun does rise and set. A "day" on the moon is half a month long. When the Sun is in the sky, the Earth is at most in "half Earth" phase. When it's nighttime though, the Earth is at least…
> a planet that has four suns I remembered five; Wikipedia says six, two of which form a binary star system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_an...) I also remember reading that such a system can exist, but can’t find a reference. It’s probably not that surprising, though, given that the proposed system has one large star and five minor ones, making it similar to a system with one star and five giant planets. Putting a planet in in such a way that it only has a night every 2000 years may be the only tricky part (giving it a much smaller orbit than the minor stars…
> Foundation also fails because human society is chaotic so his psychohistory would never work. Ant's are also chaotic as individuals, but if you get enough of them you can model them easily. We can already semi-predict global human behaviour; population graphs, economic charts, actions of specific demographics. When enough humans walk down a street, you can model their flow with fluid dynamics. Psychohistory wasn't a study of the intricacies of the human condition, it was an iterative model that follows general trends. It just happened to be sophisticated enough to predict thousands of…
How is his stuff hard science? He made up the positronic brain, and his whole psychohistory was just absurd; if anything, the idea of a brilliant cabal of scientists and technicians using psychohistory to predict the future is just dressed up witchcraft than real science. Stuff like Nightfall is just embarrassing. Most of his science output was in a bunch of nonfiction books that I'm not even sure are still in print, and he had a rep for churning out books on every subject at lightning speed, rather than for great insight. Dorsai and Dickson's stuff had issues too, but he was much better at…
I love how you put that! As a voracious reader of Asimov/Clarke/etc. as a kid, I can confirm that your description fits a depressingly large fraction of that era of SciFi. That kind of SciFi is at its best when the ideas (which are often the only thing that really matters) are so strong, they carry it all — Nightfall, Rendezvous with Rama — and at its worst when it's a bunch of “just men sitting around drinking alcohol, smoking and congratulating each other” (God, I love that description!). Even when the rest of one of his books is good, Heinlein can't resist inserting at least one pompous…
This reminds me of an Isaac Asimov short story named Nightfall[1] where (spoilers!) a species living in a trinary star system only sees the stars every few thousand years. The stars (indeed the very concept of "night" itself) are considered mythical/religious stories, and when night does come it drives the entire population violently insane, destroying the civilization and becoming the earliest myth of the civilization that rises from the ashes. [1]: http://www.astro.sunysb.edu/fwalter/AST389/TEXTS/Nightfall.h...
I wonder how that would have effected migration of humans across the planet, and how their various cultures adapted and formed. Some would see the Moon every day and night, others might only see part of the moon on the horizon. Others might only have distant stories of ancestors who saw the Moon and left it, or stories of the Moon leaving them. Others might forget about it entirely... I imagine some cultures might resist moving away from where they could see the Moon. The omnipresent Moon might become a sort of god to those that lived under it, such that they would fear traveling so far…
Thanks! Unforutnately Helliconia is not the one. I've read quite a bit of Brian Aldiss, but not that one. I think I would have remembered reading the Winter book in particular, judging from the discussion of the "Wheel of Kharnabar" in Wikipedia: >> The Wheel is an extraordinary revolving monastery/prison built into a ring-shaped tunnel with a single entrance and exit, powered entirely by the efforts of the prisoners pulling it along by means of chains set into the outer wall. Once a prisoner enters a cell of the Wheel, it is impossible for him to leave until its full ten-year rotation has…
Look for Macmillan's Best of Soviet Science Fiction series, published in the early 1980s. It's a mix of novels and short story collections. For shorts, I particularly recommend World's Spring, New Soviet Science Fiction, and Ballad of the Stars. A long time ago, I read that Asimov's short story 'Nightfall' was considered the finest short SF of all time, but I respectfully disagree. Nine Minutes, by Genrikh Altov, is that story for me. Link: http://www.altshuller.ru/world/eng/science-fiction4.asp Also - a truly awesome novel - 'Self Discovery', by Vladimir Savchenko (also in the Macmillan…
Then definitely track down Macmillan's Best of Soviet Science Fiction series: https://www.librarything.com/publisherseries/Macmillan%27s+B... and: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pubseries.cgi?1107 Think Roadside Picnic x 100, because that's the quantity of really excellent science fiction stories and ideas you can expect. A free (but bad) translation of 'Self Discovery' by Vladimir Savchenko is available if you search. I used this, together with my own physical copy, to make a proper ebook - let me know if you want a copy; I can't locate it at this moment... And, in my opinion, the finest…