The Supernova Era

by Liu Cixin

It was 8:18 in the evening, but the children were standing in the blazing light of noon. They looked up into the blue and took in a cold breath. This was most definitely not the same blue as usual; the sky was a startling blue-black, like color recorded on ultrasensitive film. And it seemed unusually clean, as if a grayish-white layer of skin had been peeled off and the sky’s pure-blue flesh was liable to start bleeding at any moment. The city was lit bright by the light, and the sight of the sun made the children cry out in alarm. This was not humanity’s sun! The light that had broken into the night sky was too powerful to look at directly, but through the gaps in their fingers they caught glimpses of a sun that wasn’t round—it was a shapeless point like other visible stars, an intense white light emitting from some point in the universe, but it didn’t seem small. It had an extremely high brightness of −51.23, almost an order of magnitude greater than the sun, and its light scattered in the atmosphere, turning it into an enormous, blinding poison spider hanging in the western sky.