Thursday, December 4, 2008

A breakthrough day


Crescent moon, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

We had a breakthrough today, as the cloud cover broke for a little while, allowing to see a couple of stars and the moon. I have a proof of that in this photo, a rare glimpse of the night sky. But mostly it was clouded today, raining or snowing or both, and there was water everywhere.

Some time ago I read a science fiction story about how seeing the stars in the sky can make big changes. The author might have been Ray Bradbury, but perhaps not, because there were no humans in the story.

The story tells of a civilization far far away, a happy people on their planet going around a sun. There was not much else on the sky, except for the interstellar dust which hid other stars from view. These people had a great talent for music and dance, and their simplest tunes we such that if they would have been known to the Beatles, the band would have been able to earn all money on the Earth.

But then one day the dust cloud thinned out, and the other stars came into view. The people realized that they were not alone. With a roar they took of in their newly made ships to kill all other life in the universe...

Update: I was referring here to an sf short story, but there are of course quite a lot of novels exploring the same idea, for example "The Mote in God's Eye" (and the sequel) by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. What I'm rather sure is that Beatles was mentioned in the story. It could also have been that this story was a story within a story, perhaps included in an sf novel.

2 comments:

Andreas said...

Cool story. Can anybody confirm Bradbury? What about the title?

Cool image as well :)

Juha Haataja said...

This is like a tune you hear and stays in the head - I'm still trying to remember who was the author of the short story. It was quite abstract, and it could have been a short-short story, or also a story within a story, for example included in a novel.