(My own copy)
"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!"
In "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg
The story, of course, being about how it doesn't quite work out like that.
When I think about “Nightfall”, Byron’s “Darkness” comes to mind, always:
"I had a dream, which was not all a dream,
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless; and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation: and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face...."
Taken from here.
(Bought in 1994)
If Byron can, why can’t I? Let's give it a go:
The fullness abhors the emptiness of light.
A quiet truth inaudible in a hopeless sky,
Calling through the soul of every man,
Imploring embodiment, a place of rest,
Faithfully witnessing entitled despair.
Grumbling like a remembering at night,
Occupying substance, enveloping sense.
Maligned perception obligingly wanes,
A breath before the recurrence leaches-
Tinging ever, the light whence ‘twas derived.
By Myselfie.
Sextuple star systems like Kalgash should be unstable. Planet Kepler 16-B orbits a binary star, where each star in turn orbits around their center of gravity. When it comes to triple-star system, the question is: where should the planets go? It just depends how the triple-star system is set up. Most multiple-star systems are hierarchical, so you would expect two of the stars to be much closer together than the third. We can have planets orbiting all three stars, but the planets must be much closer to the close-together stars whereas the more distant star can have much wider-orbit planets. What about six-star systems? You should give Space Engine a try. It's a simulation of the visible universe that used a combination of known data to provide actual stars and galaxies, and to create procedurally generated moons/planets/stars/galaxies etc. If you want to know what it's like to live on a planet with multiple stars, Space Engine is the simulator to show you. Just don't get lost in it and spend a week browsing star systems without contacting your friends or family, 'cause that's what I did back in the day.
NB: "Traditional" vampires would be screwed in a multiple star system like the one depicted in
"Nightfall".
