A Star That's Not A Star: My Scareuary 2024, #5

Not to toot my own horn here, but I'm very proud of myself for the amount of creative work I've gotten done for Scareuary so far. Incidentally, it has also led to some nice surprises, which I'll talk about in another post. 

Today's post is about the second story I brainstormed in my original post. For reference, here's that original piece of brainstorming:

a spaceship travels to a rare and unique extrasolar system, featuring four planets orbiting a giant star; unfortunately, they come to realize that while the planets are habitable, they orbit something completely different - not a star, but a gigantic organism never before seen... 👽 (maybe some Lovecraftian space horror?)

This one is certainly a little different from what I'm used to in science fiction. Believe it or not, while I've dabbled quite a bit in virtual realities, artificial intelligence, and even technologically enhanced humans, I've never written an actual full-on space exploration piece. I'm pretty sure none of my pieces have ever taken place on a spaceship in space, in fact. So this was new territory for me.

One of the reasons that I was a little concerned going into it is because I felt a overwhelmed. I don't have the lingo or the space knowledge to feel confident in my ability to write this kind of science fiction. Hyper drive? Warp speed? What's that?

Another thing: giant star? What do I know about stars? They're made of gases, the sun is a star - and that's pretty much it. What I'm trying to say is, maybe I'm not fully equipped to write a scifi of this type.

But I went for it anyway. I dove into the research. I learned about dark stars, and then I decided to make another "new" type of star for my story, and I called it a black star. (And even though I had a whole concept for what a black star is and how it had been discovered and so on and so forth, I didn't add any of that into the story.) 

And I learned about all these cool other planetary systems out there, that we know of, and I learned about how the stars are named, and how the letters mean different things (see here). 

And I took all of these cool bits and bobs and wrote a story wherein the crew of a huge spaceship have to make the difficult decision to land on a potentially survivable (not habitable) planet in a previously unexplored planetary system in the orbit of a giant star. And, unfortunately, when they approach this planetary system, almost out of fuel and in dire need of landing in order to make repairs, they find that it's not a star at all... 

It's a monster. Well, a space-creature. So gargantuan in size and abnormal in countenance that it boggles the mind - literally. 

The story currently stands at almost 3,000 words. I'm extremely happy with how it turned out!

That's one story down for Scareuary, which meets the main goal of the writing challenge, which is to write at least one scary story for the month of January. And that's one story down for the Coppe's Webbe, which means I have 3 more to go!