Review by Duncan Lunan

“Around Alien Stars”, G. David Nordley, $ 14.99, 180 pp, pbk, Brief Candle Press, 2019.

Part of this review first appeared in Interzone 284, Nov-Dec 2019.

As far as we recall, Gerry Nordley and I first met at the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow in 1995.  He and his wife Gayle visited Linda and me in Troon in 2019  (Fig. 1), after attending the Worldcon in Dublin that year, and last year they came to see us on Arran after the third Glasgow Worldcon in August. 

In 2019 his novella ‘Empress of Starlight’  (Analog, Nov/Dec 2018)  had just been shortlisted for the annual Hugo award at the Dublin Worldcon;  he gave a lecture on its ideas to the Astronomers of the Future Club in Troon  (Fig. 2), and left me with a copy of the book containing it, Around Alien Stars  (Fig. 3), which I then reviewed for Interzone 284, Nov-Dec 2019. 

In that review I focussed on his ideas about Dyson Spheres, mentioned in ‘Unbuild Your Own Solar System’  (ON, 13^th August 2023)  and ‘’Oumuamua, Astronautical Explanations’, Parts 1 & 2, ON, 17^th & 24^th December, 2023.  But this is a good time to put them into context, following on from ‘Connecting the Dots‘ last week, because now some of the concepts should look more familiar.

Speaking in Troon, Gerry Nordley emphasised that as an astronautical engineer, he guarantees that his stories involve no violation of the laws of nature, and the book’s Preface repeats the declaration.  The starship in ‘Empress of Starlight’ is based on 1995 discussions with such experts as the late Jordin Kare and Dr. Robert Forward.  Like the Breakthrough Starshot lightsails and Dr. Forward’s laser-propelled starship, the ‘typical BHP starship’  (Figs. 4 & 5)  rides on a beam, not a beam of light but a beam of microscopic pellets, like the slugs propelling the tether of the Ram Augmented Interstellar Rocket – all of those discussed last week. 

The beam is propelled and focussed by a phased-array disc in the orbit of Venus, to harvest the power of the Sun, and the starship at the end of the chain uses another, turning it to plasma and braking it almost to rest in the interstellar medium, while the ship accelerates to 86 % of the speed of light, with no Warp Drive or other apparently impossible devices or materials  (Fig. 6). 

The first ships sent to any destination  (probably uncrewed)  brake using magnetic sails and fusion rockets, both discussed last week, and their task is to build the beam projectors which will decelerate later, crewed ships  (Fig. 7).

In ‘Empress of Starlight’, astronomers in the Earth-Moon system are alerted to the fact that stars are disappearing, replaced by faint infrared sources that resemble the spheres proposed by Prof. Freeman Dyson, built around stars to harvest all of their energy output  (Figs. 8 & 9 – see ‘Unbuild Your Own Solar System’ above.) 

Real-life searches for them have so far drawn a blank, but as I recounted in ‘Space Notes 39, March 2024’, ON, 3^rd March 2024, there has been a considerable stir about stars which have apparently disappeared since the compilation of the US Naval Observatory and Palomar Sky Surveys in the 1950s.  (Keith Cooper, editorial, ‘The Vanishing Stars’, article, ‘Disappearing Act, the Mystery of the Vanishing Stars’, Astronomy Now, March 2024, summarising a presentation by Dr. Beatrix Villarroel of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm, at the 2024 European Astrofest in London.)  Dr. Villarroel heads the VASCO project  (Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observation), and in a recent YouTube interview, she reveals that comparisons with other catalogues have now established that the apparent objects on the 1950s plates aren’t pre-existing stars which have disappeared, but things seen once only – sometimes even on plates taken within the same hour.  As I said last year, one might expect that if actual stars were going missing, it would show in the plates made over a century for the Royal Observatory Edinburgh at Siding Spring in Australia, subsequently digitised in the search for extragalactic objects which drew a blank.  Almost the only possibility now is that they were objects in high Earth orbit, and there were no man-made ones at the time.  To make matters worse, several of them were very near the dates of major UFO ‘flaps’ in the USA, and the scientific community isn’t reacting well to that.

The other possibility is that these apparent sightings are due to flaws in the images;  when I discussed the matter with Dr. Nordley last year that was very much his opinion, and Dr. Alan Cayless has pointed out to me that astrophotographers back then were at the mercy of the chemicals used in photographic emulsions and developing.  The coverage of the Palomar Sky Survey in the National Geographic Magazine at the time emphasised the thoroughness with which the plates were checked, so streaks and blurs would be eliminated, but spots masquerading as stars might be a different matter.  

At any rate, the obscurations of stars in ‘Empress’ are real, for story purposes, and the starship’s destination is a radically new version of the ‘Dyson Sphere’.  In Gerry Nordley’s view, it’s a mistake to assume that all the material of a planetary system has to be used to create one.  A much thinner shell could be built in a year out of materials from asteroids or comets, ‘about one billion Manhattan Islands’ worth’, and if it was built of hexagrams 600 atoms thick, made and stitched together using nanotechnology, it could be held up and kept stable by interior light pressure alone  (Figs. 9-11).

The possible uses for such a structure are astonishing.  As a phased optical array, like the weapon system of the starship Lexx in the German-Canadian TV series of 1997-2002, it could provide telescopic images of planets up to 500 light-years away with a resolution of 11 metres, far better than most of the spacecraft we have orbiting our own planets today  (Fig. 12). 

But used as a weapon, harnessing all the power of a star, it could raise objects that size to temperatures of 20 million degrees K at a distance of 150 light-years  (Figs. 13 & 14) – putting the Lexx weapon, which destroyed Pluto while orbiting Earth, completely in the shade  (and without the seemingly impossible convergent beams of Star Wars). 

Who could be trusted with such power is a very serious question – the asocial if not antisocial heroine of ‘Empress of the Stars’ is far from the best candidate.  Her warning shot, destroying a small ‘kuiperoid’ in the outer Solar System, is more than reminiscent of Kingsley’s threat to destroy the world in Sir Fred Hoyle’s debut novel, The Black Cloud – a scene which appalled Richard Dawkins in his Afterword to the 2010 Penguin edition.

It turns out that the purpose of the ‘Red Rubber Ball’ Dyson sphere in ‘Empress of the Stars’ is to build new stars of antimatter, presumably as generators of much greater power, though there’s nothing to indicate how the original builders intended to use it.  As in all the Dyson construct stories, from Larry Niven’s Ringworld and my own near-simultaneous ‘Moon of Thin Reality’ in 1970, from Bob Shaw’s Orbitsville to Frederik Pohl’s ‘Cuckoo’, and the Next Generation episode that brought back Scotty, the makers of the constructs have left the scene – maybe advanced further, perhaps collapsed, but none of them still around.  In my Man and the Planets (1983), the discussion group which formulated the final chapter concluded that building them was a bad idea, and maybe we were right.  As my friend Bill Ramsay said in those discussions, “Going to a singularity is always dangerous”.

We’re told in ‘Empress’ that only four intelligent species have been found within the human radius of exploration.  One of them, the avian Kleth, has representatives on the starship mission to the Dyson Sphere.  Another is the Do’utians, who are cetacean, but unlike earthly whales have never completely gone back to the ocean, retaining legs and coming ashore to breed, as seals, sealions and turtles do here  (Fig. 15). 

Tongues with hands have allowed them to develop speech and technology.  The remaining three stories in this book are set in ‘The Trimus Chronicles’, a series published in Analog in the 1990s, starting with ‘Poles Apart’ and featuring a planet which has been purposively settled by those three races, including humans, to see if they can get along together.  Near the beginning there are two fascinating extracts from the planetary charter and handbook, explaining why English is the common language, numerals are Kleth, architecture is Do’uthian, and measurements, originally anatomical like ours, are in a system which can be used by all three.  Similar interpolations in the other stories discuss the agreements reached on units of mass and acceleration, getting more and more elaborate;  and social and political interactions are much more complicated. 

On one level it’s going well, but the constitution allows too much freedom for social experiments.  ‘Primitivists’ who want to go back to their civilisations’ low-tech pasts are starting to hunt their counterparts – sometimes with their acquiescence.  Atavistic humans have gone back to 19^th century customs like steam-powered whalers, polluting industries, slavery and subjugation of women.  Some Do’uthians welcome the challenge because being able to fight the humans also lets them form harems and mutilate the females to be dependent on them.  We see all this through the eyes of Lieutenant Drinnil’ib, familiarly known as ‘Drin’, a Do’uthian police officer with a human partner called Mary Pearce;  like many such more conventional pairings in detective fiction, their mutual affection gets in the way of their professionalism.  Coming upon a dead beachmaster, Drin finds himself pushed by biological urges towards becoming the harem’s provider and guardian, with tragic results as he tries to refuse the primitive role, ultimately leading to tragedy.  His police rank and his size cut no ice with the whalers, as we see early on when one of them addresses him as ‘beachmeat’.  Mary’s attempt to enforce their authority leads to the trashing of her one-person submarine, and ultimately she and Drin have to be rescued by the Kleth airborne Monitors, leaving the problems unresolved.

By the next story, ‘Network’, the governing Council of Trimus has decided that the problem is insoluble and the primitivists must be removed to another, recently terraformed planet in the system, Aurum III.  They don’t want to go, because they’re doing very nicely, thank you, in the parts of Trimus which were to have been left untouched at this stage of the experiment.  And as one of the Kleth scientists on Aurum III remarks, “We not design Aurum III from start for primitives”.  Not long afterwards he and his partner die on live camera as their research base is sabotaged.  Drin and Mary are on the team sent to investigate, and as their spaceship comes in to land it too is destroyed, leaving them to survive as best they can with minimum supplies and communications.  As they try to retrieve what they need, it becomes clear that both land and water are occupied by genetically engineered predators which weren’t in the manifest.  The whole terraforming project has been undermined by primitivist sympathisers, who have also learned to manipulate an external threat from interstellar space.  Although the conspirators are unmasked, the intended colony world and the new plan for it have to be abandoned.

All three Trimus races have achieved longevity, and Mary is now several centuries old although biologically still a young woman.  The Trimus experiment has been running for 3000 years, deliberately avoiding biological changes happening to the races elsewhere in the Galaxy, in order not to lose what they have in common in their current forms.  By the third story, ‘Final Review’, Drin has reached the police rank of Commander and the Trimus status of Councillor, and has written his Memoirs, which are a non-fiction finalist for a literary award.  The winner is to be announced by a controversial Kleth critic with a strong dislike of other species’ writing.  Kleth couples are bonded at birth and for life, as has come up in the other stories;  the ceremony is disrupted by news of the critic’s wife’s death, swiftly followed by his own.  Although there are many writers with a possible motive for this to be double murder, the only witness to the wife’s death is a distant relative of Drin’s, now being protected by the family.  After a difficult meeting with family elders, Drin and Mary go to the scene of the fatal fall, on a glacier near where his sister also met her end.  They’re pushed into a crevasse by an unseen assailant, leading to another struggle for survival, where Drin’s anatomy and constitution are crucial, and another rescue by the airborne Monitors.  It turns out that the victim was working on an exposé of advanced weapon sales by humans to the primitivists, who are not above abandoning their principles to keep the forces of law and order at bay, or even to take over the planet.  In the Review of the title, which takes the place of a trial in a human court, we learn a lot more about the age and advancement of Do’uthian culture, ‘a tradition of living with cybernetic servants that was as long as [the human] race had existed’.  As Do’uthians age they sink deeper into philosophical thought, until eventually they stop eating, and we’re not told what happens next.

In his Preface, which is well worth reading for its own philosophical content, Gerry Nordley states, “There is a fourth Trimus novella, partly finished, which I’ve been promising to finish for years, and may never get completed.  Or maybe it will become a novel.”  Either way, I hope we get to see it before too long.