I can never resist a weird scenario, especially when it’s scientifically plausible. In my short story “A Hole in the Light,” published a few days ago in the excellent Sunday Morning Transport newsletter, I went deep on the weirdly plausible. The story is about a civilization of amoebas living in the early universe, right around the time that the ambient gas left after the Big Bang started to coalesce into stars and galaxies on a massive scale. I first started mulling this one over back in 2014, when I read a paper by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb (yes, the guy who is convinced that meteor ‘Oumuamua was a spacecraft) about what he called the “habitable epoch” of the universe.
What Loeb pointed out in this paper is that we’re used to thinking of our current universe, with its galaxies and vast lightless voids between, as the most obvious time for life to arise. But what if the early universe was a better time? Billions of years ago, shortly after the Big Bang, the universe would have been full of warm gas. It could keep every planetary body as warm as Earth is in the glow of our yellow star. As Loeb told me in an interview, “For a long time, we’ve had this preconception that life is here on Earth, but the universe is dead. But maybe we should be thinking of this as a living universe. We may be relative latecomers to the game.”
When I asked him what life might have been like in this universe of cozy, illuminated gas, Loeb said it would probably have been quite simple. “Algae,” he suggested. At that time in cosmic history, environmental conditions changed so rapidly that species would have to evolve quickly before everything transformed. It seems unlikely a complex civilization like ours would arise in such difficult conditions. But what if it could?
I spent a very long lunch pumping ASU astronomer Jackie Monkiewicz for more details about exactly what the early universe might have looked like, especially when it came to the behavior of stars.
And then I imagined a species of single-celled creatures floating through this habitable epoch on some kind of chunk of matter. For them, the sky would be a golden glow – something they could swim in, or sail through. Stars would be massive, and their gravity might feel like wind whipping through the firmament. How would that species understand what was happening to their world as they watched the ubiquitous glow around them ripping apart and going dark? It would look like the universe was ending.
That’s where my character Arch enters the picture. Suffering from grief over the loss of her partner, Arch devotes herself to translating the work of an ancient physicist who first described the phenomenon she calls “a hole in the light.” As Arch discovers, this physicist was demonized by a civilization that didn’t want to believe the universe would ever change. And that's just the beginning. I hope you like this tale of a sad amoeba trying to translate ancient texts and understand the cosmos.
As a coda, scientists working with the Webb telescope recently released images of the early universe that suggest galaxies started forming much earlier than previously thought.
Cats and arcologies
Just by chance, another short story I’ve been working on for a while was published last week too. It’s called “The Almond Pirates,” and it’s part of a fiction series in Anthropocene magazine called “The Climate Parables.” I wanted to write about a very tiny, solvable disaster, set against the backdrop of the overwhelming disasters created by climate change. At first, all we know is that the main character, Shruti, has lost her cat Irving. Which, as every cat friend knows, is a disaster! As Shruti searches for Irving on her street, we gradually realize she’s living in a vast, underground arcology in the Grand Canyon.
Over a century from now, life on the surface of the planet is too hot and toxic, so people are building carbon-negative cities deep inside the Earth. As the story unfolds, we see more of the arcology’s incredible infrastructure – and here I have to thank my editor Wayt Gibbs for many worldbuilding details about how the city’s water reclamation system would work. And then, just as she’s nearly given up on finding Irving, Shruti witnesses a crime that could only happen in a city whose environmental resources are its most precious assets. Check it out, and all the other stories in the series.
Other things are happening!
If you want more environmental science action, my novel The Terraformers is officially coming soon! OK, well, it’s coming January 31, but that is sooner than you think. You can enter to win an advance copy from Goodreads, or you can pre-order it from your favorite bookstore. Want to pre-order an autographed copy? You can do that through Folio Books.