It’s been weeks since you last socialized (in the flesh) with anyone outside your household…or with anyone, if you live alone. Loneliness is tough. But things could be worse: you could be a rogue world, ejected from your home system billions of years ago. You could be a pitiful world formed far from any star. Such worlds are commonplace in our galaxy. They are not quite so common in science fiction. Still, a few of them feature in books that you may have read…
Star Well by Alexei Panshin (1968)
The deep-space object around which the eponymous space hotel Star Well was constructed is well below the potato limit. The object is conveniently located in a vast gulf otherwise bereft of significant bodies—a handy place in which to build an oasis in space. A place where one might find hospitality and … other services. For charming remittance man Anthony Villiers, it is a convenient place to await funds, while artfully avoiding questions like “when are you leaving?” and “Can you actually pay your mounting bills?” His reluctance to admit insolvency raises grave suspicions in his hotelier hosts Godwin and Shirabi. What could possibly inspire Villiers to linger in a galactic backwater? Could it be that Villiers is a covert agent who suspects just what the…other services the criminal pair offer might be? Just to be on the safe side, it’s best to kill the young man. But Villiers proves inconsiderately hard to kill.
Dying of the Light by George R.R. Martin (1977)
The rogue world Worlorn is transiting the neighborhood of the supergiant star Fat Satan. For a brief time it will be a habitable world. Outworld entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to terraform the surface and market it as an exotic destination. Now Worlorn is on its way back out into the infinite dark; all life on the planet will die. Dirk t’Larien arrives on the doomed world in response to former lover Gwen Delvano’s call. He’s confident that he can handle anything this barbaric outpost of civilization can throw at him. His confidence may be misplaced.
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Dying of the Light
Permanence by Karl Schroeder (2002)
The Cycler Compact saw interstellar brown dwarfs and other rogue worlds as an opportunity. If rogue worlds are eight times more common than stars, then the distances between them are half as great. Linked by sublight cyclers, the Compact worlds enjoyed a golden age…until the invention of faster-than-light travel sidelined them. FTL trips have to be launched near a star, which left out the rogue worlds. Formerly well-located, prosperous communities became irrelevant.
Rue Cassels comes from one such deep-space community. She discovers an abandoned sublight ship—an alien ship. Her find is precious beyond compare. Others are willing to kill to possess it.
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Permanence
The Logical Life by Hal Clement (1974)
Laird Cunningham, avid explorer of alien worlds, encounters a stygian world in deep interstellar space. Lacking the sunlight that powers ordinary ecosystems, the world should, by rights, be frozen and lifeless. What he finds instead is a sunless world that hosts a rich assortment of lifeforms, including at least one species as smart as humans. Somewhere there must be a source of energy fueling life, but what could it possibly be? Assisted by a native, Laird will try to find out.
“A Pail of Air,” by Fritz Leiber (1951)
Perhaps my favourite rogue world story: Thanks to a chance encounter with a passing dark star, Earth itself has become a rogue planet. Most people died when Earth was torn away from the Sun. The few who survived soon froze to death. The lone exceptions: one young boy, his Pa, his Ma, and his Sis, huddled in the makeshift nest Pa scrabbled together before the Big Jerk. They alone survived Earth’s demise. So why does the young boy think he saw an unfamiliar human face?
It’s clear that under the conditions as stated, it’s just a matter of time before poor judgment or bad luck extinguishes the Nest. Why bother with the daily struggle to survive when a dismal outcome is assured? The narrative answers that:
“Life’s always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,” Pa was saying. “The earth’s always been a lonely place, millions of miles from the next world. And no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don’t matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you’ve seen pictures of those, but I can’t describe how they feel—or the fire’s glow. It makes everything else worthwhile. And that’s as true for the last man as the first.”
[…] “So right then and there,” Pa went on, […] “I told myself that I was going on as if we had all eternity ahead of us. I’d have children and teach them all I could. I’d get them to read books. I’d plan for the future, try to enlarge and seal the Nest. I’d do what I could to keep everything beautiful and growing. I’d keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the cold and the dark and the distant stars.”
The works I’ve discussed so far are a subset of rogue world stories: stories about naturally occurring rogue worlds. There are other sorts of rogue world. But that’s another essay….
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is currently a finalist for the 2020 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
Another example: Poul Anderson’s “Satan’s World”.
Charles Sheffield’s “Rogueworld” is about (well) a rogue world (one that proves to be easy to provoke).
Huh. A Sheffield I’ve missed.
The Secret of the Ninth Planet reveals a rogue is hiding amongst proper Solarian moons and planets. Previously a habitable world like Earth, it was flung out of its system by means of …. well, let me quote Wollheim:
@3: It’s a McAndrew story, so you’ve probably read it.
I love A Pail of Air. I recognize that it isn’t a favourite here, but there’s something about the fighting against all odds for survival and keeping optimism in dire circumstances that really appeals to me.
charming remittance man Anthony Villiers
I initially read this as “charming Renaissance man Anthony Woodville”, which, yes, but would have made for a very different space opera.
@7, I’m guessing you’re very well versed in 15th century English history.
James Blish’s Cities In Flight (featuring the charming concept that cities develop their individual space drives—the “spindizzy”—and wander through the galaxy looking for work) featured the Free Planet of He, a planet with installed spindizzies that popped up around the galaxy from time to time
Charles Stross’s “Accelerando” uses a brown dwarf star some way outside the Solar System at one point. That’s a rogue planet described by a real estate agent . It may be a story spoiler to say that the Singularity happens either to or for other people, and the left-out have to find some lower-rent neighbourhood.
I struggled to remember details of Andre Norton’s “Waystar” and would it qualify. Appropriately, the internet only provides vague hints. Could I possibly have the name wrong? It’s in a space zone of dead worlds away from the regular space travel routes, headquarters of the Thieves’ Guild, consisting of a so-called asteroid that when found is basically covered over with mostly pirated old spaceships, and the Guild and Waystar have been in business longer than humanity has.
And, yes, Star Trek is always running into cloaked planets in the middle of nowhere with a question mark about their energy source. Tally-ho! If someone took a tip from Waystar… then probably the planet wouldn’t be found and we wouldn’t have had the story. Perhaps nine out of ten hidden planets don’t make that mistake and that’s what dark matter is, and we never find out about those.
@10 Heh. I definitely thought of Odo’s homeworld.
And Peter Watts’s Blindsight, sort of (very large spherical quantum blackbody thing at the edge of the solar system).
“A Pail of Air” is one of the most memorable stories I’ve ever read, I encountered it at too young an age, and it scared the heck out of me.
Flash Gordon’s Mongo was originally portayed as a rogue planet, wandering into our neighborhood without having suffered any ill effects from its time between the stars.
@10 “Perhaps nine out of ten hidden planets don’t make that mistake and that’s what dark matter is, and we never find out about those.”
This is, in fact, one of the theories about Dark Matter. What you’re describing would be a MACHO, or MAssive Compact Halo Object. An object that doesn’t put out light is hard to spot from Earth, unless it’s really very massive and/or close enough to something that does put out light that we can tell where the dark object is by its effect on the luminous one. Rogue planets, neutrons stars, and black holes that haven’t got an accretion disk. My (layman’s) understanding is that the current thinking suggests that while there are definitely MACHOs out there, there’s probably not enough of them to make up all of the Dark Matter that we need to be there, and almost certainly not distributed in the way it ought to be.
Which leaves WIMPS, because sometimes physicists are just having a laugh.
Infra Dra (Инфра Дракона) bu G. Gurevich:
http://epizodsspace.airbase.ru/bibl/fant/gurevich/plenniki/infra.html
(pls try google translate)
_VERY_ strong similarities with this object:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WISE_0855%E2%88%920714
I love rogue planets! They seem to have been big in the 1930s too. They’re all over Edmond Hamilton’s space operas, and one drives the plot in When Worlds Collide. I’d say the most famous rogue planet is still Mongo, ruled by Ming the Merciless till he was deposed by Flash Gordon.
@15 OMG I had forgotten Bronson Alpha and Beta! When and After Worlds Collide were some of my favorite books in my youth and the movie was even tolerable…
Chris Beckett’s Eden, from Dark Eden and its aequels.
Great stuff. I’m hoping there’s another column in the offing about dirigible planets (like He in Blish’s CITIES IN FLIGHT, the title entity in Leiber’s THE WANDERER, etc).
Starwell fits both definitions of rogue world quite well.
Time to reread the adventures of Anthony Villiers!
“Dark City” is some sort of rogue world. Or maybe just a construct?
@15 I was going to mention those two books as well, When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie & Edwin Balmer. Sadly, both are a bit dated and a tad racist in spots. But, it’s still a fantastic idea if a bit rushed. I would love to see an updated version of the novels done, only with a bit longer time scale. Bronson Alpha would be visible years before it got close to the solar system as a bright IR source. (It would have to be a super jovian to be able to hold on to the more Earth sized Bronson Beta.) And instead of magical torch drives, the arks using Orion drives!
@11 – good example, minor correction. The object Big Ben was a sub-brown dwarf. Watts used ‘quantum particle’ as an analogy for a thing that was only marginally detectable until Theseus got there.
“a black disk, a round absence of stars. In real life it weighed in at over ten Jupiters and measured twenty percent wider at the belly. It was directly in our path: too small to burn, too remote for the reflection of distant sunlight, too heavy for a gas giant, too light for a brown dwarf….For the longest time it hadn’t even been real: just a probabilistic ghost until Theseus got close enough to collapse the waveform. A quantum particle, heavy as ten Jupiters.”
I can’t find the story/book The Logical Life by Hal Clement. Is it part of an anthology/collection?
It is included in the NESFA collection, Music of Many Spheres.
Dying of the Light is one of a kind. It is a book that rewards you if you make it to the end.
Re #10 and brown dwarfs – they were very important in the Traveller 2300 / 2300 AD RPG, you had to drop out of FTL drive near a massive object every so often to avoid your engines exploding (or something, I forget the details), brown dwarfs were handy for this and vital to many routes.
One of Charles Sheffield’s stories (forget which one) had a landing on a world that was very remote from any star. This unfortunately meant that the terrain was fairly unstable, since there had never been tidal forces etc. or anything else to trigger catastrophic quakes until the ship lands.
If I remember correctly, Poul Anderson’s A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows (or one of the other Terran Empire stories) used a rogue planet but weaponized the idea – the Merseians caused a big Terran Empire military buildup on a world that they had discovered was going to be smashed by a rogue planet in a year or so.
This should be distinguished from numerous novels in which planets are deliberately used as aimed weapons, e.g. the Lensman series.
The Stars are Legion is something like a rogue world(s) tale.
Iain M Banks Against Dark Background is a superb exploration of a rogue system lost to deep time…
I don’t think anyone’s yet mentioned the Puppeteers’ mobile fleet of homeworlds in Niven’s Ringworld and Ringworld Engineers (and, apparently, an entire set of novels devoted to them, but I haven’t read them). IIRC it was five worlds, four devoted to agriculture and equipped with miniature artificial suns to light and keep them warm, one to hold their entire population and kept warm by the sheer waste heat from a massive high-tech civilization.
The German SF series Perry Rhodan has also done rogue planets several times. The first time was with the planet Barkon, which was once part of a star system ejected from our galaxy in an unexplained cataclysm; the planet’s inhabitants decided to fit their world with sublight drives and head back to our galaxy, putting themselves in cryosleep underground until the planet arrived. Later we saw the Posbis, a race of positronic/biological robots in near-invulnerable large cubical spaceships[1] whose principal base worlds are rogue plants they had moved at some point out into intergalactic space between the Milky Way and Andromeda.
[1] Yeah, yeah. If it wasn’t for the fact that the first Posbi stories were written in 1963 this would totally sound like a ripoff of TNG “Best of Both Worlds”, wouldn’t it?
Another vote for Dark Eden by Chris Beckett.
Set on a world between the stars the sky is always dark, and away from the geothermal sources of heat it gets very cold very quickly.
Well worth a read imho
There was a book where a particular species of aliens controlled FTL drive. When humans found a source of their own, they found that driving an FTL ship through a star made it go nova.
Needless to say, that’s why the aliens’ homeworld was, under power, far from any star. Just in case someone found out this particular bug.
I can’t remember the title or author, but I think it was relatively recent.
I recall one in Soviet Science Fiction or More Soviet Science Fiction about an expedition to a warm superjovian/brown dwarf less than a light-year away from the Solar System. The explorers sent down a bathyscaphe and discovered it was inhabited.
Vernor Vinge set his short story “The Science Fair” on an inhabited rogue planet. (Collected in Damon Knight’s anthology Orbit 9 and in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge.)
I thought early iterations of 2300 didn’t realize brown dwarfs would mess up their beautiful route maps?
I’ll also highlight this one… Banks indirectly brings up the planetary system’s rogue status, and only late in the novel, but its subtle revelation recasts all of the actions and underlying motivations of all of the characters in the novel. Highly recommended!
“Witches of Karres” – Karres moves from one system to another, when necessary. Not a rogue planet, exactly, but not stuck in one system.
Also “Dying of the Light” is worth reading.
In C. J. Cherryh’s Alliance/Union/… universe, FTL travel between worlds is much easier when there are dark masses to make the jump lengths more manageable (cf several of the above comments); these are mapped and occasionally named (e.g., Tripoint)
@26: It’s definitely not Knight, in which they extract the coordinates for Aycharaych’s home and destroy it (because it was a Merseian intelligence resource), but I’m blanking on which one it was.
@10
Waystar (at least as shown in Uncharted Stars) is an ancient space station that’s been endlessly added to and modified over centuries of housing pirates and criminal syndicates. Thrilling and romantic, but no actual planets involved that I can recall.
@26:
That’s “Rogueworld” mentioned in @2.
The Earth itself is hurled into space as a rogue planet in Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee: Endurance.
The Book of Confluence by Paul J. McAuley.
@17: “Chris Beckett’s Eden, from Dark Eden and its aequels.”
I admire Chris Beckett, and the coinage “aequels”.
Archibald MacLeish wrote about Earth becoming a rogue planet.
You do have to make allowances. MacLeish was a better poet than an astronomer.
…It is colder now,
There are many stars,
We are drifting
North by the Great Bear,
The leaves are falling
The water is stone in the scooped rocks,
To southward
Red sun grey air:
The crows are
Slow on their crooked wings,
The jays
have left us:
Long since we passed the flairs of Orion.
Each man believes in his heart we will die.
Many have written last thoughts and last letters.
Noe know if our deaths are now or forever:
None know if this wandering earth will be found.
We lie down and the snow covers our garments.
I pray you,
You (in any open this writing)
Make in your mouth the words that were our names.
I will tell you all we have learned,
I will tell you everything:
The earth is round,
There are springs
under the orchards,
The loam cuts with a blunt knife
Beware of
Elms in thunder,
The lights in the sky are stars—
We think they do not see,
We think also
The trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us:
The birds are too ignorant,
Do not listen.
Do not stand at night in the open windows.
We before you have heard this:
They are voices:
They are not words at all but the wind rising.
Also none among us has seen God.
(…We have thought often
The flaws of sun in the late and driving weather
Pointed to one tree but it was not so.)
As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous:
The wind changes at night and the dreams come.
It is very cold,
There are strange stars near Arcturus,
Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky.
[Archibald MacLeish, Epistle to be Left in the Earth]
@1: Satan’s World is the novel that introduced me to Poul Anderson. And that’s a discovery I’ve always appreciated.
@22/26: Thanks! The message got a bit scrambled in my reading and I wasn’t sure what “quantum particle” was doing in there. Appreciated!
Roger MacBride Allen’s “Hunted Earth” books are what came to mind for me: Ring of Charon and The Shattered Sphere. I remember loving them and wanting still more of the story, but no new additions since 1994.
Jack McDevitt’s Deepsix and then his Chindi are potential inclusions here too. Admittedly, in Chindi, it is artificial.
There’s Cinder, from Joan D Vinge’s “Catspaw” novels…It’s a planet, that once was the heart of a star, now left to wander, used as a source for a valuable crystaline mineral for making astrogation computers and other technology.
Poul Anderson’s World Without Stars is set outside our galaxy. I haven’t reread it for years, but I remember liking it a lot.
Jo Walton wrote about the book here: https://www.tor.com/2012/07/24/myths-of-the-spaceways-poul-andersons-world-without-stars/
Liu Cixin’s The Wandering Earth has the humans deliberately steering the Earth out into interstellar space to escape an incipient nova of the Sun. it’s been made into a film too.
How about “Rogue Planet” by Greg Bear, which is about a (you know) rogue planet.
Not sure the author of this piece did a sufficient amount of research. Maybe change the title to “A small selection of books about rogue worlds.”
Dear James Nicoll,
Thank you so much for writing this article and describing Lieber’s “A Pail of Air” so well.
I’ve remembered reading the story in the school library for years, and now I try to keep a record of all the stories I’ve read, every now and again remembered it, but had no idea of the author or the title. It’s now written down for safe keeping. It obviously made an impression on me, as it was one of the those short stories I always remembered reading when I tried to cast my mind back.
Thanks again
Ross
My favorite rogue world will always be the Red Star in Anne McCaffrey’s Pern universe. Obviously not habitable, but the defining characteristic of one of my favorite series.
Star Wars: Rogue Planet. I don’t think Zenoma Sekot was naturally made though.
I’ve just ordered a copy of Dying of the Light by George R.R. Martin. Can’t believe I’ve never heard of this one before! Some of Martin’s older books are definitely hidden gems.
Okay, it’s a moon, but once it becomes a wanderer, how is a moon any different from a planet? ;-) I’m sure there were novelizations, so it should fit the “book” requirement. Yes, I’m talking about “Space: 1999” – a TV series built around the rogue world concept! :-D
The original Cybermen came from a rogue planet – Earth’s twin – which had “drifted to the edge of space” before returning in the 1966 Doctor Who “The Tenth Planet.”