Eden, the planet in Chris Beckett’s Dark Eden, drifts outside the Milky Way I came up with the idea of the planet Eden in 1992 for a short story called _The Circle of Stones_. At that time, I had no idea that there really were such things as planets without suns, but it seemed likely to me. It also seemed possible to me that life might arise on such a planet, since, even here on Earth, whole ecologies thrive without sunlight around thermal vents in the deep ocean.
Life on Earth may have even have begun in such places. Quite often, if something seems likely, it does indeed happen. (In another book, I predicted that a US president would one day seek to take over Greenland and Canada.) Having written that story, I learned that free-floating planets did indeed exist. Being dark, they’re hard to spot, but a number have been detected using gravitational lensing.
And I gather it’s not particularly controversial to think that some of them might support life (though not quite in the form that I chose to imagine it – but I’ll come to that). When creating a world for a story, I don’t usually seek to make the whole thing scientifically accurate, but I try to make it hang together in a way that feels coherent. I didn’t build Eden by doing a lot of research, but I did put a lot of thought into how it might all work.
This wasn’t so I could put it all in the book – no one in Eden knows this stuff and the story is told entirely by its characters! – but so that I had something to guide my imagination and make my invented world feel coherent. My idea was that Eden had once been covered in ice, but its hot core meant there was liquid water below the ice in which life could come into existence. One particular kind of life form appeared, somewhat resembling tree roots, that was able to obtain additional energy by pushing deep down into hot rocks, pumping its sap through them to heat it, and then pumping it back up again, like a geothermal power station.
One of the ways these organisms used this heat was to push upwards into the planet’s shell of ice, melting parts of it, feeding on the nutrients it contained, and creating more living space – and they carried on doing so until much of the surface of Eden was ice-free, and had an atmosphere that would turn out to be breathable by humans. Millions of years later, this thawed-out surface, now populated by a multitude of different life forms, became the stage on which my drama could unfold: first that early story, then another story and then the novel _Dark Eden_ and its two sequels. In _Dark Eden_, a tiny community of humans, descended from stranded visitors from Earth, eke out a living using tools made of stone and wood, and try to make sense of their life as exiles from a sunlit world that lives on in folk memory, but which they can only very shakily imagine. (In the biblical story of Eden, humans are exiled _from_ Eden – my Eden _is_ the place of exile.) Their stories tell them that Earth people could fly through the air, that there was a thing there called leckytrickity, that Earth animals had eyes that you could look into and see their minds looking back out at you, not like the flat, blank eyes of Eden creatures.
On the surface of Eden, those root-like life forms put up structures that Eden’s humans call “trees”. A whole ecosystem has evolved around them, including “starflowers” that parasitise their roots. (These, as it happens, turn out to be a rich source of Vitamin D. What a stroke of luck!) And there are many animals – or quote-unquote “animals”, strictly speaking, since they’re not related to the animal kingdom of Earth.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
