How about the number of suns that shed light on Earth? How might that affect the flora and fauna? Or even culture, philosophy, society, and human nature?
Isaac Asimov's short story “Nightfall,” written in 1941, focuses on a group of scientists, mostly astronomers, and a newspaper reporter from a fictional world called Lagash. The world is not unlike Earth: it has science, religion, culture, art, architecture, universities, newspapers, etc. There is, however, one significant difference: it has six suns. The result of this constellation means Lagash does not have a night, or rather, they have a night once every two thousand years when a perfectly placed solar eclipse pitches the world in darkness.
This sounds like it might be some kind of survivalist story: what do you do when the sun goes down? And I would not be surprised to learn some script writer has tried to turn it into that. However, the story ends just as the last visible sun vanishes from view. The fates of the characters are not specified, though the outlook is certainly grim.
What makes Asimov's story interesting, and an important piece of science fiction, is not the survivalist “do-or-die” that would follow night, but a survey of how this kind of world would compare with Earth. As stated above, there are many similarities, but the differences Asimov postulates are what make it significant. A few examples include:
- Because of the suns, astronomers had to determine mathematically there is a moon.
- No artificial lighting. In fact, when they produce torches, in anticipation of the darkness, they say graduate students developed them.
- They hypothesize a one-sun system could exist, but also that orbiting planets could not foster life because it would be steeped in darkness half the time.
Most interestingly are the soft science-fiction elements:
- People go crazy or extremely claustrophobic when put in darkness.
- Religious explanations of previous nights.
- Using religious doctrines to validate scientific hypotheses.
I like to think of “Nightfall” as a science experiment that simply changes one thing and then logically extrapolates how that one change would affect everything else; particularly the people who are affected by that change.
“Nightfall” has no starships, no light sabers, no ray guns. There is certainly science but it's basic science; explanations, formulas, and telescopes, current technology for when the story was written, 1941. Until contact is made with a world like Lagash or our current sun is joined by five others, this isn't a situation we'll encounter any time soon. So it isn't science fiction in the sense of Star Trek or Firefly, namely, predictions as to how the distant future will be. Instead, “Nightfall” is a science fiction closer to Marvel or DC comics, asking, “What would it be like if our situation, our world, right now, was slightly different.” Authors of science fiction, therefore, take these diverse elements and, like a math or chemistry equation, play with the variables, and use their understanding of scientific principles to extrapolate how that would account for a different world.
Both types of science fiction, though, try to understand the relationship between humanity and science. We tend to think of science fiction in technological terms – those light sabers and starships I mentioned earlier – but those are simply extensions of science. After all, we call it science fiction and not technology fiction.
The emphasis, though, isn't on the science. Asmiov could have tried out the math himself to postulate the existence of such a world and hypothesized, in detail, the flora, fauna, and culture of that world, but there's something powerful you get from fiction that you don't get from scholarly work. This story, after all, deals with a question: what do you do when the sun goes down? Asimov's science fiction isn't just trying to explore complex scientific ideas and theories, but, in a softer science sort of way, to explore the relationship that humanity has with science.
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