Alpha Centauri in fiction
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Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to the Sun, is frequently referenced in science fiction stories, especially those involving interstellar travel.
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[edit] Literature
- In The Centauri Device (1975) by M. John Harrison the native Centaurians (humanoid aliens able to interbreed with humans) have been wiped out in a genocidal attack by expanding Earth colonisation of the galaxy. The novel's main character, whose mother was Centauran, is one of the few people in the cosmos able to operate the 'device' of the book's title; a weapon of enormous power.
- Alpha Centauri is mentioned at the beginning of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (originally a 1978 radio program, but later reappearing as a series of books, a television show, and a movie). Shortly before the Vogons demolish the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass, they inform the planet that "All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department on Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now." When someone objects to this, Protstetnic Vogon Jeltz replies, "What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri? For heaven's sake mankind, it's only four light years away you know. I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs that's your own lookout." [1] This scene appears in every incarnation of the story, including the movie version. The story and television show also mention that in the old days of the Universe, "[...] men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri" [2]. Alpha Centauri's main space port, Port Brasta, has a massive duty-free shopping mall, the motto of which is apparently, "BE LIKE THE TWENTY-SECOND ELEPHANT WITH HEATED VALUE IN SPACE -- BARK!" When written in Centaurian, this slogan is an ingenious pun which is considered by some to be the funniest joke in the universe, although it does not work in any other known language.
- In Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Earth (1986), Foundation councillor Golan Trevize and his traveling companions find the last survivors of a radioactive Earth on a largely marine planet, Alpha, which is in orbit around the largest star of the Alpha Centauri system. The name of the settlement is New Earth.
- In Poul Anderson's book, Harvest of Stars, a fictitious planet of Alpha Centauri is colonized for the single millennium before the planet's destruction by a rogue planet.
- In Larry Niven's Known Space Universe, Wunderland is an inhabitable planet circling Alpha Centauri, and was the earliest extra-solar colony in human history. Later it is occupied for a long time by the Kzinti, a catlike sentient species, after their first contact with humans, which resulted in several interstellar wars.
- In Larry Niven's and Jerry Pournelle's novel Footfall, the invading elephant-like creatures are revealed to have come from Alpha Centauri. In a discussion within the novel among science fiction writers about the presumed origin of the so-called 'snouts', one writer dislikes the idea of Alpha Centauri because it is 'trite', but admits that it got that way because it was used so often, and it was used so often because it was one of the best options.
- In Frank Herbert's Dune universe, the planet Ecaz is the fourth planet that orbits Alpha Centauri B. Ecaz is ruled by the feudal noble family of House Ecaz, and is known for its fogwood.
- In Charles Sheffield's novel Aftermath, Alpha Centauri supernovas, causing drastic effects on Earth. Through his characters, Sheffield admits that Alpha Centauri is not the right type of star to produce a supernova. This issue is not explained further in Aftermath, but in the sequel, Starfire.
- In Paul Levinson's novel, Borrowed Tides, the first starship sets forth from our solar system to Alpha Centauri - with just enough fuel for a one-way trip.
- In Philip K. Dick's early short story The Variable Man, the inhabitants of the Alpha Centauri system possess a vast but decaying empire that encircles humankind and prevents further exploration of the galaxy. Dick also wrote a novel entitled Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), which dealt with an independent former Terran Colony on Alphane III M2, an inhabitable satellite that orbits a gas giant within Alpha Centauri's planetary system. Alphane II is inhabited by sentient insectoids, who had previously fought an interstellar war with Earth, but are now engaged in an arms trade with Alphane III M2.
- In Thomas J. Hubschman's novel Alpha II a failed colony at Alpha Centauri is the subject of an explorer's investigations and troubles. On a more optimistic note, Michael McCollum's novel Procyon's Promise (a sequel to his earlier book, Life Probe) humans find the secret of faster-than-light travel by sending generation ships to the system hundreds of years before the novel.
- In Stewart Cowley's Terran Trade Authority setting, Alpha Centauri is the home system of the Alphans, the first alien race Terrans made contact with and allies in the war with Proxima Centauri.
- In Encounter With Tiber, former astronaut Buzz Aldrin and science fiction writer John Barnes write about intelligent alien who visited the Earth long ago. They had come from the Earth-like moon of a hypothetical giant planet round one of the suns of Alpha Centauri.
- In the Starfire series of novels by David Weber and Steve White, Alpha Centauri is the most important system in the Terran Federation due to the large number of warp-point junctions in the system and its proximity (one warp transit) to Earth. It is the headquarters and principal shipyard of the Terran Federation Navy. Because of the nature of warp junction travel, it was believed that it was secure from any attack because of the Terran Federation's immense strategic depth, however in the novel In Death Ground, the Arachnids discovered a closed warp point into the Alpha Centauri system, allowing the system to be threatened and seriously attacked.
- In Mark Carew's Flight of The Mayflower, NASA, through the US Government and The Mayflower Consortium (a loosely-knit group of mega-corporations), send a manned mission to the second Terrestrial planet of Alpha Centauri A, attempting to escape an Earth beset with civil unrest and Nuclear War, and establish an outpost of Humanity, far from any threat posed to life on Earth. The flight takes ten years, propelled by two redundant 1GWe Nuclear Reactors fueling an Ion Drive.
- In The Domination series by S.M. Stirling, Samothrace is a planet in the Centauri system inhabited by descendants of those who managed to escape Earth after an oppressive militaristic nation known as The Domination of the Draka won control of the planet.
[edit] Film and television
- In Space Patrol episode "Message From A Star", signals from Alpha Centauri suggest intelligent life but it would take a Galasphere 3,000 years to cross the immense distance. Irya, a being from the planet Delta, teleports himself to Earth to fit a special power unit to the Galasphere, enabling it to travel at faster-than-light speeds. Professor Haggerty, however, has reservations about making the trip.
- Star Trek references:
- In "Metamorphosis," an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, Zefram Cochrane, the inventor of the warp drive, is said to be from Alpha Centauri, though there is considerable debate as to whether this was intended to identify his place of origin or of residence. However, since he is explicitly described as human in the episode, the latter seems more likely to have been the author's intention.
- Star Trek: First Contact, the eighth film in the series, conclusively establishes he is an Earth native, as he is found by the Enterprise-E crew on Earth in the late twenty-first century.
- The novel Federation by Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens (co-writers on Star Trek: Enterprise), though superseded by the movie First Contact, postulates that Cochrane grew up on Earth, developed warp drive with the backing of Micah Brack, then led the settlement at Alpha Centauri that safeguarded humanity just a few short years later when a terrible war devastated Earth. Cochrane subsequently lived most of his remaining pre-Companion life at Alpha Centauri, thus accounting for his being "of" or "from" Alpha Centauri.
- Episodes of Enterprise would later establish that Alpha Centauri is a colony founded by humans from Earth and that Cochrane lived on Alpha Centauri for a time before his mysterious disappearance.
- In an earlier Star Trek episode, "Tomorrow is Yesterday", Captain Kirk is captured and interrogated by the United States Air Force while in the twentieth century. When pressed for his identity and origin, he flippantly tells his interrogator: "I'm a little green man from Alpha Centauri. A beautiful place – you oughta see it."
- Alpha Centauri was also mentioned in several Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes. In In the Pale Moonlight, Kira Nerys theorises that it could be threatened with a Dominion invasion.
- In "Metamorphosis," an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, Zefram Cochrane, the inventor of the warp drive, is said to be from Alpha Centauri, though there is considerable debate as to whether this was intended to identify his place of origin or of residence. However, since he is explicitly described as human in the episode, the latter seems more likely to have been the author's intention.
- Babylon 5's "Centauri" race is not from Alpha Centauri; this is merely the name they call themselves (due to a mistranslation during first contact). They were the first extraterrestrial race the humans had contact with, although this is not due to Alpha Centauri's proximity to the Sun (Sol).
- In the Lost In Space TV series, Alpha Centauri is the intended destination of the United States spacecraft Jupiter 2 launched October 16, 1997 and crewed by the Robinson family and Major Don West. Stowaway Dr. Zachary Smith sabotages the mission on behalf of a foreign government, sending the ship off course.
- The inhabitants of Alpha Centuri appear twice in Doctor Who. Playing a cameo role in the Third Doctor stories The Curse of Peladon (1972) and the Monster of Peladon (1974), the Centurion ambassador is depicted as a large egg shaped green blob wrapped in a cloak with a singular slit eye and a high pitched voice.
- The main planet in James Cameron's AVATAR screenplay orbits Alpha Centauri and is called Pandora, " . . . or more properly Alpha Centauri B-4. Discovered by the first interstellar expedition twenty five years ago, Pandora has been the single most interesting thing to happen to the human race in ages. The news services love to run clips of the wild scenery on Pandora, and its bizarre flora and fauna. To a culture which has lost all contact with the natural world, Pandora is mysterious, primal, and terrifying."
[edit] Comics and animation
- In the DC Comics universe, the planet Rann originated in the Alpha Centauri system. Rannians are so close to normal Earth-based humans that Adam Strange was brought to the planet to act as a sort of breeding stud. This was before Rann was teleported out of the Alpha Centauri system, into a parallel pocket universe, and then to the Polaris system.
- In the first issue of the original Marvel comic book Transformers (1984-1990), it is said that Cybertron orbited Alpha Centauri. After repeated millennia of explosive wars waged on the planet by its inhabitants the Autobots and the Decepticons, the planet was knocked loose from its orbit and sent wandering into interstellar space.
[edit] Games
- In the 1991 computer game Civilization and its sequels, one of the ways to achieve victory is to successfully launch an expedition to colonize Alpha Centauri.
- Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, a spiritual sequel, involves seven ideological factions competing to colonize the Earth-like planet Chiron that orbits Alpha Centauri. The name of this planet in a game in itself is a homage to James P. Hogan's 1982 space opera novel Voyage from Yesteryear, where a human colony is artificially created at Alpha Centauri by automatic probe on a planet later named by colonists as Chiron; Chiron in the game has two moons, named after the centaurs Nessus and Pholus, with the combined tidal force of Earth's Moon, and is the second planet out from Alpha Centauri A, the innermost planet being the Mercury-like planet named after the centaur Eurytion.
- In the computer game Independence War, Alpha Centauri is described lying roughly at the center of the known jump point network, giving this system high strategic importance.
- In Halo: Combat Evolved, the description for one of the multiplayer maps is "Chiron TL34, 'Spartan Clone Training Complex'". In the novel Halo: The Fall of Reach, as the young Spartans are embarking on their first mission by boarding a freighter, they come across wine, on a goods list, of Alpha Centauri vintage.
- In the PlayStation game series Colony Wars, Alpha Centauri was the first star system to be colonized outside of our own solar system.
[edit] Toys
- Lego set 6988 of the Blacktron II faction is known as "Alpha Centauri Outpost".
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