I just read Stephen Baxter‘s “Last Contact” in Jonathan Strahan’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. Last Contact is an apocalyptic story about what would happen if Dark Energy pulled the universe apart down to the atomic scale (and beyond). The scenario is called “The Big Rip” and was thought might happen in 10 trillion years or so, but Baxter’s premise is that it happens in the next 10 years, which causes the death of every human on Earth.
The story itself is very well written with compelling characters, but didn’t really do that much for me because the plot is linear (by design), and the protagonists passive. It’s merely an execution story on a grand scale, which we get TONS of in the slush at EDF.
The Big Rip, the driving force of Baxter’s tale, has now been proven false, in the same year Baxter wrote his story. How’s that for bad luck?
Universe Today reports:
Previously, it wasn’t known for sure if dark energy was a constant across space, with a strength that never changes with distance or time, or if it is a function of space itself and as space expands dark energy would expand and get stronger. In other words, it wasn’t known if Einstein’s theory of general relativity and his cosmological constant was correct or if the theory would have to be modified for large scales.
But the Chandra study strengthens the evidence that dark energy is the cosmological constant, and is not growing in strength with time, which would cause the Universe to eventually rip itself apart.
That’s why I’m leery about writing near-term science fiction. Sometimes the science just works against you.