e Velorum

I stumbled across James Blish's ... And All the Stars a Stage at a used-book discount. 'Tis oft-excerpted at Atomic Rockets so I thought it might be good. Strange at Ecbatan has a full review to which I won't much refer, since I haven't finished the book. UPDATE 5/22 PM - this gun has been un-jumped. No, the book doesn't get better.

Best I can tell the book is a revision of a series which Blish wrote in the late 1950s; in 1960 he got what he had done, published, in two parts. Rich Horton tells me that Blish had lung cancer (and probably other ailments) in 1970 when this revision came out. The book is an interstellar Aeneid, precursor to Battlestar Galactica and to Kanata no Astra. Probably a direct inspiration to the latter.

Blish sets the stakes by setting his start NOT at Earth. Arthur C Clarke might be hack enough to do Songs From Distant Earth; our man Blish knows our own Sun isn't about to explode, and neither is any star near it. At least... he knew by 1970 and, possibly, by 1958. So his Sun is a white giant toward the end of his life, when it is burning titanium.

Blish leaves us guessing at first, sadly not well. I scented intertextual strain (but perhaps not where I should have been sniffing). The earth here has a single Moon which serves as Luna, and an innermost planet which isn't named but feels Mercurial. It all smelt like Asimov's Currents of Space before that one had to disavow his own story.

As revised, the story can rewrite the history of the industrial-revolution. A nova at the right place and the right time, which didn't happen at Earth, taught humanity about the Periodic Table and much other chemistry and physics, over the past "three hundred years". We are given to understand that a "year" in this yarn is like an Earth year. Because in the first revisions it was an Earth year.

Pity that Blish didn't know any physics. I mean, besides the obvious - that he's got hyperlight travel. Greedy bastard couldn't even conceive a warp bubble device, which keeps the crew young whilst the outside universe gets older. But we'll move on.

The habitable-zone of a white giant is large, as Blish knows, since he pegs in a couple other near-Earths. (They stand, I suspected and now know was supposed to be red-herring, at least for Mars in the original draught and a terraforming Venus also.) As to the star we're supposed to be thinking of the Crab Nebula; but to give Blish some rope, I picked one of the smaller "A" class biggies off of Wiki: HD 73634 aka e Velorum, 7.8 M_☉. Luminosity is 4140 L_☉; 7977 K. By this calculator the (dying) planet should run in 55 Earth AU semimajor.

I must point out, again, that "A" stars of this high mass do not last a thousand My as Blish assumes. HD 73634 is all of 40 My already. Stars in this range should expect 200 My. Blish knew, sort-of, this much already also. But he needed advanced life on his planet so could not allow this short of time for his civilisation.

Now let's bring Kepler in here. For "A" supergiants in our units GM/μ > 7.8 = 4π²a³/T². a = 55. So, 0.1975 = 55³/T². T=√842,080 = 917 of OUR years. (Compare our own Eris, 67.86 AU and 559 years.) Luckily for Blish he has his red-herring moon so his "year" can be lunar - although, he might be alternatively be using the variable-star cycles of his Sun, George Martin style. He does have a religion of "The Ghost" which might, like our own dear Church, know its way around a solar-cycle.

I think the story can only work if its humans are settlers here from a former Empire. Same can be said for Nightfall of course.

Horton directs us to Disclave #80 (1972) republished Vector June 1984, the piece about ducks. Blish, we learn, disavowed THIS book.