Brian Burt's Blog: Work in Progress - Posts Tagged "solar-eclipse"

Last week was an epic, cosmic blast in the U.S. as the solar eclipse cast its sprawling shadow from the west coast to the east coast. I took the day off to celebrate with my family. We weren't lucky enough to be in the path of totality -- and we had intermittent clouds -- but it still represented a rare moment of celestial history. We got to our local library too late to score a pair of those precious eclipse glasses, but we did manage to watch the progress with a pinhole viewer my wife made from a Cheerios box. (Old school, baby!) And you could actually see countless images of the moon taking bites out of the sun from the light filtering through the leaves of trees. Of course, the repeated drama of totality streaming on NASA's video feed, beginning in Oregon and ending in South Carolina, took our breath away.

The next day, as my sons and I were walking after breakfast and chatting about the eclipse, my mind suddenly leapt back to a classic science fiction story inspired by a similar phenomenon. The great Isaac Asimov wrote his original novelette version of Nightfall in 1941; he collaborated with the brilliant Robert Silverberg to expand it into a full-blown novel in 1990. I still remember that story lighting up my imagination as a kid, like Baily's beads dancing along the rugged lunar limb.

Imagine living on a planet in a multi-star system where six suns trace their disparate paths across the sky, never leaving your world in darkness. Imagine that, every two millennia, a precise planetary alignment results in the lone sun being temporarily eclipsed. Imagine that -- as a lead scientist eagerly anticipating this cosmic event -- you learn from a colleague that archeological evidence now strongly implies that your world's civilization experiences cataclysmic collapse whenever that lone sun vanishes and darkness falls.

For anyone who relished the eclipse last week, this story remains magical. It, like the dazzling display of light and shadow we just witnessed, will leave you with a sense of awe. The novel is excellent, but I'm personally still partial to the original novellete. If you haven't had the pleasure, it's freely available in several places on the web, such as this one:

"Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov

I heartily recommend this if last week's eclipse whetted your appetite and left you hungry for more. When night falls on a world that knows only day, the implications can be both wonderful and terrible. Enjoy!

#SFWApro