idea for another site:

the stellar neighbourhood

Here's a suggestion for another website, on the lines of this one but for the "nearby" interstellar scene.

Stid: Wait, before you go on: how near is "nearby"? That word - in the absence of any natural frontier - isn't going to save the proposed new site from dissipating into generality as it rambles off into the interstellar vastness... unless, somehow, you give it shape.

extent

Zendexor: I was thinking, "stellar neighbourhood" could mean "out as far as the most distant named star."

Stid: Ah, the familiar folkloric stars. Sirius, Procyon, Vega, Arcturus and so on, all the way out to Deneb. Naturally at the bright end of the scale, with high intrinsic luminosity, spectral type F, A or B, these stars are precisely the ones most likely too hot and short-lived to have planets with intelligent life; on the other hand they do have instant name-glamour, and I can visualise, now, the kind of website we're most likely talking about: a celebration of all that cutely unrealistic sf featuring planets and aliens around Rigel and Betelgeuse and so on. You're going to have fun, Zendexor.

Zendexor: I'm not, but someone is, I hope. I'm throwing the suggestion into the arena, in the hope that it will be picked up by a webmaster with more time to spare than I have.

Harlei: Stid, you mentioned Deneb, but isn't that a bit far for the "neighbourhood"?

Stid: Not a bit of it! 2500 light-years away; that's only one fourtieth the size of the Galaxy. Stars with names are all close by as galactic distances go.

Zendexor: I agree with Stid here: you could count Deneb as the "stellar neighbourhood". You could, in fact, regard it as the frontier. That would permit the inclusion of some famous nebulae and star clusters within the site's permissible range. You could then have pages on the Pleiades (see Samuel R Delany's Nova) and the Horsehead Nebula (see Asimov's The Stars Like Dust)...

Stid: Before we get carried away, might I suggest an alternative? Doubtless the Sun was born alongside other stars in a molecular cloud... Don't tell me, I know, that association has long since dispersed. But - might it have left traces? Wisps of slightly greater than usual concentration in the interstellar medium? You could use that as an excuse for a smaller range... say as far as Aldebaran.

Zendexor: A nice idea, but forget it, Stid. The Rigellians and Denebians would be up in arms - it would never do. Let's not exacerbate interstellar tensions. Rather, let's draw up a preliminary list of sources to give a start to the site... always in the hope that someone might take up the suggestions and add to them.

named stars

The sources listed here are of literary references to stars which have proper names. The stories don't always have scenes actually set around those stars; e.g. Wasp is set in the Sirian Empire, not at Sirius itself; but it thereby shows that star's importance. Similarly there's not much about Vega in Agent of Vega, but you feel it somehow... So anyhow, here's a preliminary listing. I'll no doubt be adding to it as more stuff occurrs to me.

Achernar - Edmund Cooper, Transit

Alcyone - Hal Clement, Cycle of Fire; planet Abyormen.

Aldebaran - E E 'Doc' Smith, Galactic Patrol, in which the Lensman meets the Wheelmen of Aldebaran I. Clifford D Simak, Time And Again, in which reported deaths on Aldebaran XII are an ominous worry for an administrator on Earth.

Algol - H P Lovecraft, Beyond the Wall of Sleep.

Alioth - Clark Ashton Smith, The Ocean World of Alioth (synopsis and draft of opening)

Altair - Hal Clement, Close to Critical; the film Forbidden Planet (set on Altair IV);
Leigh Brackett, The Woman From Altair.

Antares - Edmond Hamilton, Kaldar, World of Antares; The Star Kings and Return to the Stars; and Starman Come Home / The Sun Smasher; Donald Wandrei, The Red Brain.

Arcturus - David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus; planet Tormance.

Canopus - Frank Herbert, Dune; planet Arrakis. Has the planet which is the seat of the Council of Suns in Edmond Hamilton's Within the Nebula; and the planet Throon, capital of the Mid-Galactic Empire, in the same author's The Star Kings and its sequel Return to the Stars.

Capella - Jack Vance, Emphyrio; planet Maastricht.

Deneb - source of the peril to humanity in Sentinels From Space by Eric Frank Russell.
According to the later Captain Future stories, the people of Deneb were (alas for those of us fed up with COMOLD) the fountainhead of humanity, ancestors of all the humanoid races in the universe.

Fomalhaut - Edmond Hamilton, The Star Kings and Return to the Stars.

The Hyades - Edmond Hamilton, Doomstar.

Mira - John W Campbell, The Ultimate Weapon.

Polaris - Clark Ashton Smith, The Red World of Polaris.

Procyon - John and Dorothy Cowey, Goma's Follicles (for Procyon IV); Edmund Cooper, Seed of Light (for Procyon II). The interstellar generation-ship in Brian Aldiss' Non-Stop has been to Procyon.

Rigel - John Brunner, The Long Result; Eric Frank Russell, Next Of Kin; Jack Vance, the Demon Princes series (for the 'Rigel Concourse': 26 planets, the initial letters of their names running from A to Z); Edmond Hamilton, Starman Come Home / The Sun Smasher.

Sirius - Larry Niven, The World of Ptavvs, planet-sized moon Jinx; Eric Frank Russell, Wasp, planet Diracta; Jack Vance, Space Opera,the "Sirius Planet" episode; Robert G Temple, The Sirius Mystery (perhaps the most respectable of "Alien Visitors" speculations); Edmund Cooper, Seed of Light (in which a generation-starship from Earth visits a planet that turns out to be deadly); John Coleman Burroughs and Hulbert Burroughs, The Lightning Men, planet Nova Terra.

Vega - James Blish, Earthman, Come Home features the sinister Vegan Orbital Fort; James H Schmitz, Agent of Vega - planet Jeltad; Jack Vance, the Demon Princes series (planets Aloysius, Boniface, Cuthbert); the friendly Hazers of Clifford Simak's Way Station come from Vega XXI; the general in Edmond Hamilton's Battle for the Stars has a home on Vega Four; and Vega figures largely as an advanced governing world in Heinlein's young-adult novel Have Spacesuit - Will Travel. An interesting non-organic intelligence inhabits the minerals of Vega Five in John Rackham's Computer's Mate.

designated stars

This section is for stars which are referred to by designation - i.e. a Greek letter plus the genitive of the constellation, or other identifier. Authors keener on scientific plausibility, who would turn up their noses at the thought of setting their tales around Vega, are likely to be happier with Tau Ceti or Epsilon Eridani.

Alpha Centauri - Leigh Brackett, Alpha Centauri or Die! Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Footfall. A E van Vogt, Far Centaurus.

Beta Centauri - Poul Anderson, A Sun Invisible.

61 Cygni - Clifford D Simak, Time and Again.

Eta Piscium - for the planet Kolama in Jack Vance's Magnus Ridolph story The Spa of the Stars; Vance refers to it as "Eta Pisces".

Pi Aquarii - for the planet Moritaba in Jack Vance's The King of Thieves, a Magnus Ridolph story to be found in the collection The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph.

Pi Sagittarii - for the planet Kokod in Jack Vance's The Kokod Warriors, one of his tales featuring the detective / troubleshooter Magnus Ridolph.

Proxima Centauri - the tale of that name by Murray Leinster. Plus Now Wait for Last Year by Philip K Dick.

S Doradus - The Storm by A E van Vogt. Note that this superluminous giant star is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, though in the van Vogt tale it's placed incorrectly in the Lesser Cloud. Either way, it's not what we usually think of as the stellar neighbourhood; yet because of its brilliance it stands out sufficiently to have been given an individual designation.

Tau Ceti - John Greer, Star's Reach ; Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed.

themes

So far, we've sketched out an idea for a site in which, just as Solar System Heritage is about the literary characters of worlds in our System, the Stellar Neighbourhood Heritage would mainly consist in exploration of the characters of various well-known, named stars.

Here are some further thoughts regarding themes to be pursued.

You could explore "crosswise"... e.g. in thematic pages on "Type A Stars" or "Type F Stars", etc. Poul Anderson's Hunters of the Sky Cave is a memorable attempt to portray life forms which evolved (if I remember correctly) round an F star.

A page on Dark Nebulae... e.g. the Coal Sack and the Horsehead; Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye as well as Asimov's The Stars Like Dust; and the good old villains from the Dark Nebula in Edmond Hamilton's The Star Kings.

Of course you'd want a whacking great page on Niven's Known Space series, a topic tailor-made for a Stellar Neighbourhood site.

modernity

Stid: Well, your eyes are lighting up as the ideas start to flow, Zendexor! Looks like quite a job, but you're no doubt eager to wade into it. I wish you every success.

Zendexor: I told you, I have no absolutely intention of undertaking the project myself. Looking after the OSS is more than enough for me without the OSN as well. I'm simply sketching out some of the possibilities, so that someone else may take them up. But if that does happen, I'd be happy to support the new site with contributions.

Harlei: "OSN", you say? Not the New SN too?

Zendexor: Ah, now that's a point. A vital point, which I could have made at the start. Do we actually need the word "Old" here? No, actually we don't! Our current dreams still envelop the stars! Space probes haven't snapped away the romantic views of the stars as they have those of the planets. (And in John Greer's view, they never will, because we'll never really get out there.) Even the old ideas of life around Vega and Sirius might be true after all. So we're in the happy position of being able to avoid contradictions to all our visions of what those stars' worlds may be like.

Therefore - the Stellar Neighbourhood, pure and simple. Not the "O" SN, but the SN, full stop! Though admittedly some of the literature is delightfully old-style...

extracts

aldebaran:

From Time And Again, p8:

...he wondered about the blackened bodies lying on the riverbank on far-off Aldebaran XII and the twisted machine that was wrapped around the tree.

Three humans had died there... three humans and two androids, and androids were almost human. And humans must not die by violence unless it be by the violence of another human...

...A smashed machine and broken bodies and a great smoking gash sliced across the turf. The silver river flowed in a silence that one knew was there even in the photograph and far in the distance the spidery web of Andrelon rose against a pinkish sky...

From Time is the Simplest Thing, p123-4:

The shed... was surrounded by a high, rank growth of dead, dried weeds... It was built of the corrugated metal sheets which had been much in use for buildings of this sort before the introduction some three-score years before [of] the putty-plastic from Aldebaran VII...

From The Seed of Evil:

...Neverdie had settled quite well into human society... His needs were financed out of the returns from his books. Julian had studied them all assiduously, especially the lengthy Aldebaranian Social Organisation, but had learned nothing useful. He was not interested in how an extinct species formed 'hedonistic rank-order', as was apparently the case...

From Bring Back Yesterday:

...I heard the blonde babbling about Vegan fire trees and Aldebaran singing vines and all the rest of them; evidently she was a keen horticulturist...

alioth:

The world was the fourth of a system of seven planets that circled the great sun known as Alioth to astronomers. In their approach from outer space, the cosmic voyagers had chosen it for investigation with a view to finding fresh food... However, as they neared it, the planet was seen to consist entirely of oceans, apart from seemingly barren patches of land at the poles, and a few tiny islands... [The Ocean World of Alioth]

alpha centauri:

"...permit me to welcome you to the four planets of Centauri. It is a great moment for me, personally. From early childhood, I have been trained for the sole purpose of being your mentor and guide; and naturally I am overjoyed that the time has come when my exhaustive studies of the middle period American language and customs can be put to the practical use for which they were intended."

He didn't look overjoyed. He was wrinkling his nose in that funny way I had already noticed...

[Far Centaurus]

alphard:

...he'd spent other years in studying that nameless science stemming from the thaumaturgists of Alphard XII... [Way Station, p.78]

...He stood rigid, with her hand upon his arm.
   The flashing light! he thought. The pyramid of spheres!
   For now he remembered who had given it to him - one of those aberrant races of the Alphard system. And it had been from the literature of that system that he had learned the art of fairyland. They had tried to help him by giving him the pyramid and he had not understood...
   ...It was the fixation agent that banished all illusion, that made a fairyland for real...

[ibid., p.205]

altair:

"...we find the strangest life forms. Remember the Chunquen?"
   "Both sexes were sentient. They fought constantly."
   "And that funny religion on Altair One. They thought they could travel in time."
   "Yes sir. When we landed the infantry they were all gone."           [The Warriors]

antares:

...Of all the stars in all the countless host that once had spotted the heavens, there remained only Antares. Antares, immensest of the stars, alone was left, the last body in the universe, inhabited by the last race ever to have consciousness, ever to live... [The Red Brain]

...Banning began to piece together a vague picture, an undreamed-of cosmic history.

The Old Empire, the Empire of the Valkars! They had ruled it from Katuun at Antares, their starships had webbed the galactic spaces, and the peoples of a myriad suns paid tribute to their power... [Starman Come Home]

...Merrick could see in the light of the two risen red moons that the giant peaks of the range were of a height unknown on earth, and that the great range itself was surprisingly regular in its circular shape. In the clefts between the mountains was white snow, but there was none on the great peaks, for they and the gigantic chasms and cliffs gleamed as though glassy-smooth, black and awesome masses.

"They look as if they were of black metal," Merrick commented to the men beside him, and was amazed at Holk's answer.

"They are metal, O Chan..." [Kaldar, World of Antares]

...Planet Five of Antares was a hellish, hot, reeking place with an atmosphere so lethal that one breath of it would swiftly have killed a man. But 4-2-5's kind were not men. Their flesh was of a porous, silicous composition, breathing and living in a different way than any flesh native to Earth. Hideous, hard-shelled things, 4-2-5's kind crept through the shadowy jungles of their world, and dwelt there in a strange luxury...

[Hotel Cosmos]

arcturus

He read the titles of a few of them: 'Basic Statutes of Arcturus XXIV'...

[New Folks' Home]

"The Arcturus math, you mean," said Enoch. "I know little more than when I told you of it. It is too involved. It is based on behaviour symbolism..."

[Way Station]

...the surface of Arcturus III was close under them, shaggy with forests and humped with mountains like the back of some monstrous beast...

[Fugitive of the Stars, p.28]

...He thought nostalgically of the other pleasant periods he had spent in the long spell of his existence. Of the fair civilisation beneath the blood-red Arcturus sun where he had recently lived for ten thousand years...

[The Seed of Evil]

   "Well, he goes off along a new twail completely. He twies to show that ahcheological wemains on the thuhd planet of the Ahctuwian System show that humanicy existed theah befoah theah wah any indications of space-twavel."
   "And that means it was humanity's birth planet?"
   "P'haps..."

[Foundation, p.52]

"...One time Howard walked a back street in Bugtown, on Arcturus IV, and a mugger jumped out. Howard asked: 'Are you registered with the Organization?'
"'No, I am not.'
"'Then you'll not get a cent from me...'"

[The Book of Dreams, p.9]

beta centauri:

...At full quasi-speed, he drove straight for Beta Centauri.
The sun grew and grew before him. Under magnification, he could see the disc, seething with nuclear storms, raging with... prominences, hell-blue and terrible. Eleven times the mass of Sol; fourteen hundred times the luminosity; across a full hundred and ninety light-years, one of the brightest stars in Earth's sky. He tried to whistle a tune, but the sound was too small and scared... [A Sun Invisible]

betelgeuse:

...Startled glances were batted back and forth. Xantippe! No one had ever been to Xantippe! The weird, cometary planet of Betelgeuse was, and had always been, taboo - and for good reason... [Medusa]

canopus:

For all that I had visited it many times before, it was with something of awe that I contemplated the great white sun, as our ship flashed on toward it. Its colossal blazing bulk, I knew, was greater far than the whole of our own little solar system, millions of times larger than our own familiar little star, infinitely the most glorious of all the swarming suns. It seemed fitting, indeed, that at Canopus had been located the seat of the great Council of Suns of which I was myself a member, representing our own little solar system in that mighty deliberative body whose members were drawn from every peopled star... [Within the Nebula]

...The enormous white disk of Canopus was sinking toward the horizon, flashing a supernal brilliance across the scene. In that transfiguring radiance, the peaks and scarps of the Glass Mountains here above the sea flung back the sunset in banners and pennons of wild glory.

And outshining even the stupendous glory of the glass peaks shone the fairy towers of Throon. Domes, minarets, graceful porticoes, these and the great buildings they adorned were of shimmering glass. Mightiest among the structures loomed the gigantic palace on whose high terrace he stood. Surrounded by wondrous gardens, it looked out royally across the great metropolis and the silver ocean beyond.

In the radiant sunset out there over the glittering peaks and heaving ocean there flitted swarms of fliers like shining fireflies... [The Star Kings]

He read the titles of a few of them... 'The Practical Law of Canopus XII'.

[New Folks' Home]

"...Where, to your knowledge, is the most intolerably drunken den of the Oikumene?"
Gersen considered. "Not an easy choice to make. A hundred thousand saloons from Earth out to Last Call clamor for that distinction. Twast's Place on Krokinole can hold its head high, Dirty Red's on the pier at Daisy's Landing, on Canopus III, is another well-known resort..."

[The Book of Dreams, p.149]

capella:

...Hors d'oeuvres of Ten Worlds
Broth with Aloe nuts and Water flowers,
in the style of Benitres, Capella VI....

[The Face p.174]

61 cygni:

"The planets are either cloud-covered or screened, for we've never seen the surface of a single one of them. And when you get within a few billion miles of the system you start sliding." He looked at Clark. "That's the right word, isn't it?"

"There's no word for it," Clark told him, "but sliding comes as close as any. You aren't stopped or you aren't slowed, but you are deflected... In the early days, it drove men mad trying to reach the system and never getting a mile nearer than a certain imaginary line..."

[Time And Again]

delta pavonis:

...The screen turned and plunged down toward the planet. Green swirls filled it, and then all at once we were among the swirls, in a place where the sky was pale green and big white clumps of something else that might have been clouds drifted past, and there was no ground at all, just green sky above and below and as far as you could see in every direction. Something drifted into sight, something that looked a little like a clump of soap bubbles with a lot of thin feathers dangling down from it, but the feathers were moving and the soap bubbles got bigger and smaller as it drifted on by...

...the voice said, "You cannot visit our world and meet us, but if you could, this is what you would see."

The image drew back, so we could see hundreds of the bubbles-and-feathers things, drifting around in the green sky. "More than four million of your years ago," the voice said, "our species reached the stage of complex technology." Something like a vast heap of soap bubbles and spiderwebs came into sight, glowing with points of light; I guessed it was a city, or something like one. "We made the usual mistakes, and suffered the usual consequences." The image changed; the sky turned brown and murky, and another of the city-things came into sight, torn, lightless, empty. "Our recovery was long and difficult..."

[Star's Reach, p.290]

deneb:

...Quickly, the moment the catwalk for passengers was open, I dashed through the hatch and out into the bright, warm air of Deneb City. The giant sun was high above; it was a pleasant spring day.

And then all the pleasantness vanished. I saw the mob...

[The Android Kill]

epsilon eridani:

See 1960 in the History of Hopes.

epsilon sagittae:

...Linsil Orq: a lake of the Blissful Plains, Verlaren, second planet to Komred, Epsilon Sagittae...

[The Face]

fomalhaut:

...in the light of the flying moons, the old kings of Fomalhaut stood and dreamed in stone. All the way from the far-flung lights of the city up to this massive palace the great avenue of statues ran, eleven dynasties and more than one hundred kings, all towering up much larger than life so that the envoys who came this way would feel a sense of awe...
[Return to the Stars]

...just let's assume that some race able to traverse space visited Earth. It might have been the people which left ruins on the Fomalhaut planets...

[Star King, p.120]

gamma eridani:

Lencilorqua: a village of 657 inhabitants on Vasselona Continent, Reis, sixth planet to Gamma Eridani. [The Face, p. 21]

lambda gruis:

...Gersen inspected him with open curiosity. This was the first Star King he had observed as such, though popular belief had hundreds moving incognito through the worlds of man: cosmic mysteries since the first human visit to Lambda Grus [sic].
[Star King]

On pages 119-121 Gersen, in conversation, explains what is known or guessed about the race called Star Kings - sexless and parthogenetic, yet astonishingly manlike in outward form.

Mira:

...Mira was so-named by Earthmen because it was indeed a "wonder" star... Irregularly, and for no apparent reason it would change its state of radiation. So far as those inhabitants of Sthor and her sister world Asthor knew, there was no reason. It just did it... When Mira decided to take a rest, Sthor and Asthor froze up, from the poles most of the way to the equators. Then Mira would stretch herself a little, move about restlessly and Sthor and Asthor would become uninhabitably hot, anywhere within twenty degrees of the equator...

[The Ultimate Weapon]

mizar

...He closed the book and sat quietly in the chair, wondering if the statisticians of Mizar X knew of the Thubans' work. Perhaps they did, he thought, for certainly some of the math they used was unconventional...

[Way Station]

"...Thesis for degree in College of Symbology: title: 'The Meaningful Elements in the Eye Motion of the Tunkers of Mizar Six..." [Star King, p.104]

"Consider the Tunkers of Mizar Six... they are a religious group: ascetic, austere, devout to an astonishing extreme. The men and women dress identically, shave their heads, use a language of eight hundred and twelve words, eat identical meals at identical hours - all this to protect themselves from the perplexity of wondering about each other's motivations..."

[Star King, p.108]

phi ophiuchi:

...Sarkovy, the single planet of Phi Ophiuchi, was a dim world of steppes, swamps, black forests, morasses. The Sarkoy lived in tall wooden houses behind timber palisades... By prctice and tradition the Sarkoy were accomplished poisoners. A Master Venefice reportedly could kill a man merely by walking past him...

[Star King, p.59]

pi cassiopeiae:

Locater-ship estate-houses are to be found in the cosmolitan centres of the Oikoumene, including Pi Cassiopeia's [sic] Copus and Orpo [Star King, p.51]

...Time passed - a week, two weeks. Kokor Hekkus received mention in the news as the presumptive kidnaper of a Copus, Pi Cassiopeia [sic] VIII, mercantilist. Gersen was mildly surprised; the Demon Princes seldom kidnaped for ransom.
Two days later came news of another kidnaping, the scene on this occasion being the Hakluz Mountains of Orpo, Pi Cassiopeia VII; the victim a wealthy packer of sour-spore. Again Kokor Hekkus was reputedly involved; indeed only the possible participation of Kokor Hekkus made the not uncommon crimes noteworthy...
[The Killing Machine, p.21]

the pleiades:

[A view from a nearby star:]
...the stars swarmed and glittered, the seven giant Sisters so brilliant in their nebular hazes that they cast shadows, the lesser members of the cluster and the more distant suns of the galaxy filling the sky with their wintry hordes...
[The Three-Cornered Wheel]

polaris:

Burning with preternatural whiteness in the black ether, Polaris broadened hour by hour to a huge incandescent disk. Soon the flames of its corona were visible, soaring in the face of the measureless night; and, falling through the crystalline ports of the ether-ship, its rays mingled weirdly with the violet-tinged illumination of the electric bulbs, and cast their supermundane gleams on the pale faces of Volmar and his crew.

Volmar, peering ahead with aquiline keenness, was the first to see the planets...

[The Red World of Polaris]

"You know notation system used by people of Polaris VII?"

"No, I don't," tapped Enoch.

"Then no use to tell you of our own. Must know Polaris first."

So that was that, thought Enoch. He might have known...

[Way Station]

pollux:

The small gray metallic sphere drifted down through the night sky of Pollux V twenty-nine light-years from Earth. The eerie pinkish glow of the two moons glinted softly on the floating sphere...
It dropped gently through the atmosphere on its antigravs toward the dark surface of the planet below... It hovered above the branches of a stand of trees for a moment, shifted course slightly, and settled in a field of grass and shrubs...

[The Marginal Man]

procyon:

[A generation starship has begun its return journey:]
"...So few people left aboard. We are now ten days out from Procyon V. The monotonous years stretch like dead weight before us... [Non-Stop, p.171]
"...Adversity makes thinkers of us all. Only now, when the long journey means no more than a retreat into darkness, do I begin to question the sanity behind the whole conception of inter-stellar travel. How many hapless men and women must have questioned it on the way out to Procyon, imprisoned in these eternal walls!..." [ibid., p181]

proxima centauri:

The Centaurian race had developed from carnivorous plants, as men from carnivorous forebears. But at some early date in man's progression, the worship of gold began. No such diversion of interest occurred upon the planets of Proxima Centauri. As men have devastated cities for gold, and have cut down forests and gutted mines and ruthlessly destroyed all things for gold or for other things which could be exchanged for gold, so the Centaurians had quested animals...

...Three planets of Proxima Centauri were endowed with climates and atmospheres favorable to vegetation and animal life, but only on one planet now, and that the smallest and most distant, did any trace of animal life survive...

[Proxima Centauri]

rasalgethi:

The case of Valmatan vs Mer El in interstellar law has a panel for review which includes the Earthman, Frederick Gray, and

...Vanz Kamis, Rasalgethi VI

[New Folks' Home]

rigel:

"...they were the first to land on Beta Orionis Six. Their ship had hardly grounded when it started coming apart under them. In twenty minutes the whole thing was just about dismantled. Turned out the natives thought it was another puzzle from their fifth-planet friends. They were apologetic about it, and put the ship back together in thirty minutes or so. When Liang and Sarapati left, a few days later, the natives asked them whether they knew of any really difficult puzzles." [Criterion]

...civil war rent the whole fabric of interstellar civilization and shattered the Old Empire. Many, many far systems and worlds, when the star-ships came no longer, sank into barbarism and a long night.

A few star-worlds retained their civilization, their technics. They kept a few star-ships flying. And those few worlds, centering around the system of Rigel, expanded their efforts to bring more and more worlds back into a cooperative civilization. Thus had begun the New Empire, which professed to reject the pride and pomp of conquest of the Old Empire...
[Starman Come Home]

It is Rigel, that magnificent star among stars, whose prodigious luminosity and spacious Zone of Habitability has afforded the Concourse its existence. Impossible not to marvel at the sheer grandeur of the system! Think of it! Twenty-six salubrious worlds swinging in stately thousand-year orbits around the dazzling white sun, at a mean radius of thirteen billion miles, not to mention the six oft-ignored planets of the incandescent Inner Belt, and Blue Companion, a fortieth of a light-year to the side!

[The Killing Machine, p.37]

The discovery of the Rigel Concourse, and the delightful, unforgettable anecdote of the naming of its worlds, is related on pages 54-5 of Star King.

s doradus:

   The fine spray of dark rain that had dogged his exploration walk was retreating over the yellow rim of valley to the "west".
   As he watched, a small yellow sun burst out from behind a curtain of dark, ocherous cloud and glared at him brilliantly. Below it an expanse of jungle glinted strangely brown and yellow.
   Everywhere was that dark brown and intense, almost liquid yellow...
                                                                                                                  [The Storm]

sirius:

It was... Mandark who had led that little band of scientists and picked youth away from the doomed Earth in the great Ark of Space. After two hundred and twenty years the Ark had found a planet in the system of the giant sun Sirius. But to land meant death - death from titanic bolts of lightning that constantly struck the planet... [The Lightning Men]

   Jinx is the close moon of a gas giant planet more massive than Jupiter, and smaller than Jupiter because its core has been compressed to degenerate matter. A billion years ago Jinx and Primary were even closer, before tidal drag moved them apart. This same tidal force had earlier locked Jinx's rotation to Primary and forced the moon into an egg shape, a prolate spheroid. When the moon moved outward its shape became more nearly spherical; but the cold rock surface resisted change.
   That is why the ocean of Jinx rings its waist, beneath an atmosphere too compressed and too hot to breathe; whereas the points nearest to and furthest from Primary, the East and West Ends, actually rise out of the atmosphere.
   From space Jinx looks like God's Own Easter Egg: the Ends bone white tinged with yellow; then the brighter glare from rings of glittering ice fields at the limits of the atmosphere; then the varying blues of an Earthlike world, increasingly overlaid with the white frosting of cloud as the eyes move inward, until the waist of the planet/moon is girdled with pure white. The ocean never shows at all...                               [The Borderland of Sol]

tau ceti:

We're told in Star's Reach about the plight of the inhabitants of Tau Ceti II's previous civilization:

"...They figured out how to use the concentrated energy sources on their planet, and used them up so fast and so carelessly that they ran out of energy and messed up their climate around the same time... There was no rain worth mentioning on their islands for something like two thousand of our years...
   "...The Cetans' intelligent phase can't stay together for more than a few hours. So that was the end of their old world...
   "...Finally the rains lasted long enough on one set of islands that the Cetans there figured out how to build catchment basins and cisterns, and finally solar stills that would make artificial rain right through the drought periods. So their culture survived, and they built boats and spread the skills the had from island to island right around their world...
   "...Some satellites, some probes out to other worlds, and a few trips that put a couple of Cetans on the surface of Tau Ceti III for a day or two and got them back alive..."

thuban:

The case of Valmatan vs Mer El in interstellar law has a panel for review which includes the Earthman, Frederick Gray, and

...Eta Nonskic, Thuban XXVIII

[New Folks' Home]

...It was a liquid tank case and those, as a rule, were the most uninteresting of all. They usually were hard ones to strike up a conversation with, because too often their concept of language was too difficult to handle...
[Way Station, p.23]

...the Thubans from planet VI are perhaps the greatest mathematicians in the galaxy. They have developed, it seems, a numeration system superior to any in existence... [ibid., p31]

vega:

Vega was now some twenty-five light years away in space; but in the foreshortening magic of the ship's vision tank, its dazzling, blue-white brilliance floated like a three-inch fire-jewel before them. A few hours later, great Jeltad itself swam suddenly below with its wind-swept blues and greens and snowy poles - to the eyes of the two watchers on the ship much more like the historical Earth-home of both their races than the functional, tunneled hornet-hive of Terra was nowadays. [The Truth About Cushgar]

...Did the Hazer have a ghost?
The people back on Vega XXI had known the moment he had died and all the circumstances of his death... [Way Station, p.175] See also 1915.

Earlier in Way Station, p.87-91, we are told a lot about the Hazers of Vega XXI, from the journal kept by station-keeper Enoch Wallace, with whom they strike up a friendship.

Jay Birrel of the Fifth Squadron is coming home to Vega Four [Battle for the Stars, p.20]:

He watched as the purplish globe expanded into a great, misty blue mountain-and-desert world, the capital of a Sector which was, in everything but name, an empire of stars. ...the Fifth, all traffic cleared away before it, broke atmosphere and came growling and thundering down across the black mountain-chains toward Vega City...

[ibid., p30:] Birrel looked down at the city. This was Old Town, a place of graceful, white roofs and cupolas and golden-yellow trees and grass, and rambling, quaint (and dirty, he had to admit it) narrow streets. The native Vegans, Lyllin's people, had built it and it showed how far they had come from their fierce tribalistic-war state of centuries before. They might have got further on their own as time went on, but then the universe had crashed in upon them... all sorts of people from many worlds and of many blood-strains, all part of the space-explosion. It was these newcomers who had built New Town, whose gleaming miles of metalloy and glass dwarfed the older quarter...

On p.45-8 we are given an interesting scene in Old Town, the Varn Festival.

From Bring Back Yesterday:

...I heard the blonde babbling about Vegan fire trees and Aldebaran singing vines and all the rest of them; evidently she was a keen horticulturist...

From The Palace of Love, p.28:

...Aloyius with its sister planets, Boniface and Cuthbert, were the first worlds to be intensively colonized from Earth. Aloyius hence, presents aspects of considerable antiquity, the more so that the first settlers, a dynamic group of Conservationists, refused to build structures not in harmony with the landscape...

zubeneschamali:

He read the titles of a few of them... 'Jurisprudence on Zubeneschamali III, VI and VII...'

[New Folks' Home]

stellar cluffs

The S.N. site could have a page for more "glancing" references e.g:

Aldebaran:

...the putty-plastic from Aldebaran VII

[Time is the Simplest Thing]

It had taken him some time to lose his identity. He had done that on the swarming waystation worlds of Aldebaran, where he had altered the tint of his skin and hair and submerged himself in the masses of humanity and near-humanity that mingled around the starports. Using a forged Aldebaranian permit, he had found a job in the crew of a small freighter bound for the Hyades...

[Doomstar]

Altair:

"...Talking of coffee, shall we adjourn to the Grotto? I've some rather decent Altairian Dragon's Blood that we could have as a liqueur."
[The Gateway to Never]

Fomalhaut:

...the low coffee table, the top of which was a slab of the fabulously expensive opalwood from Fomalhaut VI...
[The Rim of Space]

Procyon:

...Procyon pin-heads...

[Starman Jones]

Tau Ceti:

"I bet plenty of people would pay a couple of marks to have a picture from Tau Ceti II to hang on the wall..."
[Star's Reach]

Xi Puppis:

...whoever carved Monument Cliff on Xi Puppis X...

[Star King, p.120]

Brian Aldiss, Non-Stop (1958); Poul Anderson, "The Three-Cornered Wheel" (Analog, October 1963); Hunters of the Sky Cave (1965); "A Sun Invisible" (Analog, April 1966); Isaac Asimov, Foundation (1951); The Stars Like Dust (1951); Barrington J Bayley, "The Seed of Evil" in New Writings in SF-23 (1973), edited by Kenneth Bulmer; Leigh Brackett, "The Woman From Altair" (Startling Stories, July 1951); Alpha Centauri or Die! (1963); John Coleman Burroughs and Hulbert Burroughs, "The Lightning Men" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1940); John W Campbell, The Ultimate Weapon (1936); A Bertram Chandler, Bring Back Yesterday (1961); The Rim of Space (1961); The Gateway to Never (1972); John and Dorothy de Cowey, "Goma's Follicles" (Planet Stories, Summer 1948); Edmund Cooper, Seed of Light (1959); Raymond Z Gallun, "Hotel Cosmos" (Astounding Science Fiction, July 1938); John M Greer, Star's Reach (2014); Edmond Hamilton, "Within the Nebula" (Weird Tales, May 1929); "Kaldar, World of Antares" (Magic Carpet Magazine, April 1933); The Star Kings (1949); "Starman Come Home" (Universe, September 1954 - published in 1959 as "The Sun Smasher" in an Ace Double together with Ivar Jorgenson's "Starhaven"); Battle for the Stars (1961); Return to the Stars (1964-5); Fugitive of the Stars (1965); Doomstar (1966); Robert A Heinlein, Starman Jones (1953); John Jakes (as Alexander Blade), "The Android Kill" (Imaginative Tales, November 1957); Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed (1974); Murray Leinster, "Proxima Centauri" (Astounding Stories, March 1935); Larry Niven, World of Ptavvs (1966); "The Warriors" (Worlds of If, February 1966); Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God's Eye (1974); "The Borderland of Sol" (Analog, January 1975); Chad Oliver, "The Marginal Man" (Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1958); Robertson Osborne, "Criterion" (Startling Stories, January 1951); John Rackham, "Computer's Mate" in New Writings in SF - 8 (1966), ed. John Carnell; James H Schmitz, "The Truth About Cushgar" in Agent of Vega (1960); Clifford Simak, Time And Again (1951); Time is the Simplest Thing (1961); Way Station (1963); "New Folks' Home" (Analog, July 1963); Clark Ashton Smith, "The Red World of Polaris" and "The Ocean World of Alioth (fragment), in Red World of Polaris: The Adventures of Captain Volmar (ed. Ronald S Hilger and Scott Connors, 2003); E E 'Doc' Smith, Galactic Patrol (originally serialized in Astounding, 1937); Theodore Sturgeon, "Medusa" (Astounding, February 1942); A E van Vogt, "The Storm" (Astounding, October 1943); "Far Centaurus" (Astounding, January 1944); Jack Vance, the five novels in the Demon Princes series: 1. Star King (1964); 2. The Killing Machine (1964); 3. The Palace of Love (1967); 4. The Face (1979); 5. The Book of Dreams (1981); The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph (1966 collection of six stories featuring the character of that name); Emphyrio (1969); Donald Wandrei, "The Red Brain" (Weird Tales, October 1927).