SF History in Leeds, Scriven Bolton and Space Art

Thomas Simeon Scriven Bolton (1883-1929)

For this month’s post I decided to return to the theme of SF history in Leeds and the work of former Leeds resident Thomas Simeon Scriven Bolton (1883-1929). Bolton was a commercial illustrator and amateur astronomer, who lived in Bramley with his family from 1911.

As an illustrator, he specialised in astronomical subjects, also known as space art. Space art covered a range of drawing styles: illustrations of astronomical phenomena reproduced from telescopes; technical illustrations with overlaid graphics and text; and imagined planetary or lunar landscapes. Bolton produced all three kinds of illustrations and these were published in a number of newspapers, magazines and books in both the UK and North America.

Clive Davenhall, who has written an extended essay on Bolton’s art, suggests that he introduced several innovations into the field and describes his technique as follows:

Bolton developed an effective method for producing realistic lunar landscapes that involved making a model of the surface in plasticine or similar material, photographing it and then painting over the photograph. This approach was a development of the technique of modelling the lunar surface and photographing it under oblique light.

Being an amateur astronomer, Bolton also published many of his astronomical observations in science journals such as Nature and the Journal of the British Astronomical Association.

A lunar landscape by Bolton using the technique described above.

However, the SF connection can be found in Bolton’s work for magazines such as Popular Science. These types of publications tended to focus on topics of popular interest in astronomy, and on speculations about imagined worlds, planetary surfaces and undiscovered moons.

Bolton’s work thus shares affinities with the writings of SF fans and scientific enthusiasts, discussed previously on this blog, who saw their speculations as contributing to and advancing the sciences, particularly in the field of cosmology. A more detailed consideration of this topic is available here.

Earth-sized Planets Discovered Orbiting Nearby Star

It was around this time last year, when I posted about exoplanets and the possibility of habitable life beyond Earth. Perhaps, then, a year on, is an apt time to revisit this theme and one of my favourite space stories from 2017 – the discovery of exoplanets found orbiting Trappist-1. Trappist-1 is a red dwarf star, located 39 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. As such, it is one of our nearest neighbours in the Milky Way.

2015 was the year of the first discovery of Earth-sized planets orbiting Trappist-1 but, early in 2017, astronomers announced the news of additional exoplanets around the star, seven in total. The Guardian first published a story on the discovery in February, with follow-up stories in May and August.

The seven planets are, to date, the largest number of exoplanets found orbiting a neighbouring star, raising hopes that the search for alien life might be within reach using the next generation of astronomical telescopes. Trappist-1 shines with a light 2000 times fainter than our sun, meaning that the planets are more likely to hold liquid water and surface life. Researchers hope to obtain this information within the next decade.

One of the most exciting aspects of the story – alongside the possibility of discovering aliens, or a planet capable of supporting human life – was the incredible orbits of the planets and the prospect of the Trappist-1 star looming large in the sky from the planets’ surface (see illustration below). Because the planets are so much closer to the cool Trappist-1 star, each of their orbits is more compact than those of the planets orbiting our sun – the closest with a very short orbit of one and a half days, the furthest away taking 20 days.

Illustration of the view of Trappist-1 from the fifth planet by Nasa/JPL-Caltech.

These phenomena put me in mind of SF narratives that hinge on inter-world relationships, and the planetary astrophysics underpinning such stories. A famous example is Isaac Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’, a 1941 short story, later adapted into a novel with Robert Silverberg. The action takes place on Lagash, a planet located in a multiple star system with six suns, which keeps it constantly illuminated. The coming of an eclipse is a cause for concern for the planet's scientists, who fear that the general population will be unable to cope with the darkness. However, ultimately, it is the discovery of other stars and planets, which become visible during the eclipse, that sends Lagash's inhabitants into a frenzy.

The double planet (or binary planet) system of Urras and Anarres in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is another memorable example, in which the juxtaposition of capitalist Urras and anarchist Anarres functions as a device for Le Guin’s exploration of ‘ambiguous’ utopias. In a variation of this theme, the planet Solaris, in the novel of the same name, orbits a binary star system with one red-coloured and one blue-coloured sun.

Geographies of the double planet system Urras and Anarres.

Finally, returning to our solar system, the Twilight Zone episode, ‘Midnight Sun’, imagines a scenario in which the Earth's orbit has been disturbed, causing it to move slowly towards the sun. In the end, it transpires that this was only a fever dream experienced by the protagonist Norma, and the Earth is in fact, inexplicably, moving further away from the sun.

SF experimentation with different star systems and planetary configurations adds to the other-worldliness of the stories, even while often offering a critical lens on real world issues. The Trappist-1 discovery begins to shed light on just how distant or close such other worlds may be.

Mysterious Star Discovered in our Solar System

The recent hype over galaxies far, far away in the wake of the new Star Wars film reminded me of this story from back in October. Scientists announced the discovery of a mysterious star in the Milky Way amid a swirling constellation of objects that could be a swarm of alien megastructures. Catchily dubbed KIC 8462852, it has also been called Tabby’s Star after Tabetha Boyajian, one of the researchers who discovered it.

The Kepler Space Telescope first picked up the star in 2009 and the swirling mass was initially thought to be bad data movement. However, over time, it became clearer that a cluster of objects was orbiting KIC 8462852, because of the light pattern emitted by it. In fact, further investigation of the star was partly thanks to several citizen scientists on the Planet Hunters project, who flagged up its strange and interesting formation. Boyajian and her colleagues published a paper on KIC 8462852 that models natural scenarios to try and explain this, for example a giant ring system or fragments due to the break-up of a large comet. Yet other hypotheses remain, one being that it is a set of alien megastructures for harvesting light from the star. Of course, such theories are part of the reason KIC 8462852 attracted so much press attention. Nevertheless, significant funding goes into maintaining the search for alien life. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute has focused on looking for potential intelligent signals for over half a century, and astronomer Jason Wright was quoted as saying that KIC 8462852 is ‘the best SETI target I've ever seen or heard of’. Wright is publishing a paper with an alternative interpretation of the star’s light pattern, which also considers how to distinguish possible artificial megastructures from other anomalous objects. The paper is available to view here.

KIC 8462852

The news of KIC 8462852 coincided with a similarly exciting October event I attended, Andrew Rushby’s talk, ‘Exoplanets and the Apocalypse’, as part of the Café Scientifique public lecture series. Rushby, who is set to take up a post at NASA in 2016, gave an overview of his research on exoplanets, which are planets that orbit other stars beyond our solar system. His research investigated Earth-like (or habitable) exoplanets and their lifespans, in order to model what might happen when the world ends (about 22 billion years from now). One of the most interesting asides to the talk was about the possibility that some of these Earth-like planets might support life as we know it, i.e. carbon-based life. Rushby suggested that the development of an instrument sensitive enough to reliably analyse planets’ atmospheres could lead to the detection of chemicals such as cfcs. This would constitute evidence of artificially generated gases and hence intelligent, industrialised life. Personally, I find the idea of aliens burning non-renewable energy sources a bit disheartening; on the other hand, the thought of a giant light harvester perhaps offers a glimmer of extra-terrestrial hope.