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A decade before developing the Alastor Cluster series, Vance included the idea of dark stars in the Demon Princes series. In Star King, Vance portrayed Kirth Gersen as visiting Hildemar Dasce's "planet" which was actually a "dark star". He imagined stars with, "a dead surface, perhaps still faintly warm".
Hildemar Dasce |
Space pirate base near a Y-dwarf star. The League of Yrinna: a novel from the Ekcolir Reality |
After publishing his set of three Alastor Cluster novels (if only there had been more!), Vance then returned to the Demon Princes saga and published The Face. In The Face, Vance imagined that the Cora star system had once been a binary star system, but one of its two stars had "disintegrated into fragments". That long-gone star, called 'Fideske', had been a "small dead star". According to Vance, the largest remaining fragment of Fideske had become the moon Shanitra, now in orbit around the planet Methel. Other fragments of Fideske formed an asteroid belt. Some fragments, containing "rare and precious elements of high atomic number, the duodecimates" fell onto the dry planet Dar Sai where they could be mined and collected from the wind-blown sands.
a dark matter star |
In the current millennium, after dark matter was recognized as a major constituent of galaxies, a theoretical type of dark star was proposed that could have been fueled by dark matter. It has been suggested that some such 'dark stars' might have become very large very quickly. After their "dark matter fuel" was used up, these massive stars could have collapsed to form super-massive black holes such as the one at the center of our galaxy.
The League of Yrinna |
The League of Yrinna
For The League of Yrinna, I am imagining a form of matter (hierions) that is manipulated by the Phari. As hierion engineers, the Phari can even control the movement of Alastor Cluster through space.
In fact, it might be best to imagine Alastor Cluster as an artificial star cluster that has been "built up" and created by the Phari during the past 5 billion years.
Some how, the space pirates in the League of Yrinna have been able to hide their fleets of spaceships from the Whelm for thousands of years. Normally, for a story set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe, I might simply say that a spaceship could be hidden in the Hierion Domain.
Blackstar
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