We went out by a path that led through a big clump of flickering starflowers and then into Batwing. A whole bunch of Batwing grownups and newhairs were in their clearing banging away at a giant redlantern tree with their blackglass axes, working in the pink light of its flowers.

We walked round the edge of their clearing to Family Fence, dragged away the branches at the opening, and went out into open forest. No more shelters and campfires ahead of us now: nothing but shining trees.

Hmmmph, hmmmph, hmmmph, went the trees. Hmmmmmm, went forest. We walked for a waking under the light of the treelanterns, slashing down whatever birds and bats and fruit we could get as we went along, and finally stopped to rest at the big lump of rock called Lava Blob. Old Roger handed us out a gritty little seedcake each, made of ground-up starflower seeds, so we could have something in our bellies, and then we settled down with our backs against the rock, so we didn’t have to worry about leopards sneaking up behind us. There were lots of yellowlantern trees round there, which we didn’t get so much back in Family, and also yellow animals called hoppers that came bouncing out of forest on their back legs and wrung their four hands together while they looked at us with their big flat eyes and went Peep peep peep. But hoppers were no good to eat and their skins were no use either, so we just chucked stones at them to make them go away and let us sleep in peace.

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When we woke up, Starry Swirl was still bright bright in sky. We ate a bit of dry cake and off we went again, under redlanterns and whitelanterns and spiketrees, with flutterbyes darting and glittering all round us and bats chasing the flutterbyes and trees going hmmph, hmmph, hmmph like always, until it all blurred together into that hmmmmmmmmm that was the background of our lives.

After a few miles we came to a small pool full of shiny wavyweed and all us newhairs took off our wraps and dived into the warm water for crabfish and oysters to eat. All the boys watched Tina Spiketree diving in, and they all thought how graceful she was with her long legs, and how smooth her skin was, and how much they wanted to slip with her. But when she came up she swam straight to me, and gave me a dying oyster with the bright pink light still shining out of it.

“You know what they say about oysters, don’t you, John?” she said.

Tom’s neck, she was pretty pretty, the prettiest in whole of Family. And she knew it well well.

In another couple of hours we reached the place where Peckham Hills began to rise up out of forest of Circle Valley, and started to climb up through them by Monkey Path, which isn’t really a path, but just a way we know through the trees. The trees carried on up the slopes – redlanterns and whitelanterns and scalding hot spiketrees – and there were flickering starflowers growing beneath them, just like in the rest of forest. Streams ran through them down from darkness and ice, heading towards Greatpool, still cold cold but already bright and glittering with life. And small creatures called monkeys jumped from tree to tree. They had little thin bodies, and six long arms with a hand on the end of each. Handsome Fox shot one with an arrow, and was pleased pleased with himself, even though they were all bones and sinews and only give a mouthful of meat, because they move fast and are hard to aim at with those big blotches on their skin that flash on and off as they swing among the lanternflowers.

As we climbed up it got colder. The starflowers disappeared, the trees became smaller, and there weren’t any monkeys any more, only the occasional smallbuck darting away through the trees. And then the trees stopped and we came out from the top edge of forest onto bare ground. Pretty soon, when we’d climbed above the height of those last few little trees, we could see whole of Circle Valley spread out below us – whole of Eden that we knew, with thousands and thousands of lanterns shining all the way from where we stood on Peckham Hills to Dark shadow of Blue Mountains away in the distance, and from Rockies over the left, with the red glow of Mount Snellins smouldering in middle, to the deep darkness over to our right that was Alps. And above all of it the huge spiral of Starry Swirl was still shining down.

Of course, with no trees to give off light with their lanternflowers or to warm the air with their trunks, it was dark dark up there – you could only just barely make things out in the starlight and the light from the edge of forest – and it was cold cold, specially on our feet. But us newhairs dared each other to run up as far as the snow. The ice felt like it was burning, it was so cold, and most kids took ten twenty steps, yelled and came running down again. But I took Gerry right up to the ridge of the hill and then, ignoring Old Roger yelling at us to come back, went far enough down the other side so that the others couldn’t see us.

“We’ve made our point now, haven’t we, John?” Gerry said, shivering. We only had waistwraps on, and buckskins round our shoulders, and our feet were hurting like they’d been skinned. “Shall we go back down to rest of them now?”

My cousin Gerry was about a wombtime younger than me – his dad was giving his mum a slip, in other words, about the time that I was born – and he was devoted to me, he thought I was wonderful, he’d do just about anything I asked.

“No, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Be quiet and listen.”

“Listen to what?”

“To the silence, you idiot.”

There was no hmmmmmmmm of forest, no hmmph, hmmph, hmmph of pumping trees, no starbirds going hoom, hoom, hoom in the distance, no flutterbyes flapping and flicking, no whoosh of diving bats. There was no sound at all except a quiet little tinkle of water all around us coming out from under the snow in hundreds of little streams. And it was dark dark. No tree-light up there. The only light came from Starry Swirl.

We could barely make out each other’s faces. It made me think about that place called Earth where Tommy and Angela first came from, way back in the beginning with the Three Companions, and where one waking we would all return, if only we stayed in the right place and were good good good. There were no lanterntrees back there on Earth, no glittery flutterbyes or shiny flowers, but they had a big big light that we don’t have at all. It came from a giant star. And it was so bright that it would burn out your eyes if you stared at it.

“When people talk about Earth,” I said to Gerry, “they always talk about that huge bright star, don’t they, and all the lovely light it must have given? But Earth turned round and round, didn’t it, and half the time it wasn’t facing the star at all but was dark dark, without lanterns or anything, only the light the Earth people made for themselves.”

“What are you talking about, John?” Gerry said, with his teeth chattering. “And why can’t we go back down again if you just want to talk?”

“I was thinking about that darkness. They called it Night, didn’t they? I’m just thinking that it must have been like this. What you get up here on Snowy Dark: it’s what they would have called Night.”

© Chris Beckett

This is an extract from by Chris Beckett (Corvus), the November read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

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I came up with the idea of the planet Eden in 1992 for a short story called . 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 , 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.

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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. Phew! 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. There’s no sunlight in Eden (and therefore no alternation of day and night) but, like organisms that live in the ocean depths of Earth, Eden’s life has developed bioluminescence. The “trees” have luminous “lanternflowers”; the starflowers glitter. Imagine a leafless forest on a moonless night, lit by thousands of Chinese lanterns. Then add in twinkling fairy lights at ground level. With your eyes half-closed, the forests of Eden would look something like that.

Just as life on Earth depends on plants that turn sunlight into chemical energy, so the life of Eden depends on geothermal trees. They bring heat to the surface to power their metabolisms, they keep the air warm and, if you live on Eden, the steady “Hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph” of their constant pumping is the background of your waking and sleeping life, merging in the distance to a steady hum. All the trees are hot, and some of them are so hot that you’d burn yourself if you touched their trunks. If you cut down a tree, you have to watch out for the spurt of scalding liquid that bursts out.

When I read stories set on alien planets, I’m sometimes disappointed in the “animals” (I’ll drop the inverted commas now). Writers often seem to dream up a motley collection of bizarre creatures without much regard for how they might actually survive or how they are related to one another. I tried to design my animals on evolutionary principles, giving thought to how they were adapted to their environment, the role they played in the ecosystem and how they might plausibly have evolved. Animals on Earth fall into a large but finite number of basic body plans. For example, monkeys, cows, crocodiles and seagulls all have four limbs and, though some descendants of quadrupeds have lost their limbs (snakes, whales), there are no examples of quadrupeds developing extra ones. In the same way, large animals on Eden all have a six-limbed body plan. There are other animals that don’t conform to this, just as there are arthropods, et cetera on Earth, but the large animals are all based on this six-limbed pattern.

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I’ve already mentioned how different Eden eyes are from the eyes of terrestrial animals. They have evolved alongside the evolution of bioluminescence, rather in the way that colourful flowers and nectar-eating insects have evolved alongside one another on Earth. Eden trees use luminous lanternflowers to attract the creatures that help them reproduce, just as flowering plants on Earth use colour and scent.

I gave a lot of thought to the biology of Eden, but I have to admit that, in strictly scientific terms, my imaginary world isn’t entirely viable. Free-floating planets with warm cores? Yes! Not just possible, but a certainty! But free-floating planets with warm surfaces? Sadly no. More than one astronomer has told me they just couldn’t happen. No matter how many radiator-like trees there might be, I’ve been told, it still wouldn’t be enough to maintain liquid water or a warm atmosphere.

Let’s call it “fiction science”, science made up for a story, which works in some places and in others allows itself poetic licence. Almost all science fiction uses fiction science and Dark Eden contains several other examples. I took some liberties with human genetics, for instance. And then there’s the question of how people got to Eden in the first place. (It’s many light years away from Earth.) Like the writers of pretty much all stories set in interstellar space, I pretended that faster-than-light travel was possible and went with that, although it most probably isn’t.

(I think that’s OK. It allows us to visit, in our imaginations at least, parts of the universe we could never otherwise hope to reach.)

What I wanted from Eden was for it to be a world that hung together well enough to be a satisfying setting for my story, one in which I and my readers could immerse ourselves. The story is about exile and loss. The perpetually dark sky, and the animals with their blank unreadable eyes, serve as reminders that Eden folk are exiles. At the beginning of Dark Eden, every human being in Eden lives around a circle of stones that marks the place where their ancestors first touched down. And this circle represents to Eden folk the hope for return and redemption, which is central to their whole world view.

The fact that I took some liberties when constructing Eden doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be interesting also to write about a real free-floating planet. And, as it happens, I’ve had the opportunity recently to do just that. In a project initiated by Comma Press, I was one of a number of writers who paired up with astronomers from Jodrell Bank to write stories for an anthology called . My astronomer collaborator, Ida Janiak, helped me build a scenario in which a free-floating planet called Lupus arrives in the solar system. Apart from being roughly Earth-sized, Lupus isn’t much like Eden, but somewhat like the Jovian moon Europa. Its surface is covered by a kilometres-thick shell of ice in no danger of melting, with a liquid ocean beneath and… well, read the story! The anthology will appear in November but there will also be a condensed version of mine and Ida’s story in the Christmas edition of New Scientist, out online on 16 December and in print on the 19th.

I hope, meanwhile, you will immerse yourself in the luminous forests of Eden with their pulsing trees. Possible or not, they are very beautiful, if I say so myself.

by Chris Beckett (Corvus) is the November read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

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Sadly, though, a theory of that kind is not what Hawking means. Read
on a bit and it turns out he is simply talking about a unified theory that
would bring together the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.
This would indeed be an achievement, but it would shed very little light
on languages, microbes and man, and nothing at all on falling in love! Scientists,
it seems to me, are rather prone to making extravagant claims. This is a
pity because, although I am sure most scientists are much too intelligent
to take their own claims completely literally, society at large seems much
inclined to take them at face value and really to believe that science can
provide an answer to every question. Perhaps scientists should be more careful
about the words they use? Hawking’s statement about the ‘single theory’
is an example of a particular kind of claim that is especially prevalent:
the claim that by reducing something to its simplest components you have
somehow completely explained or described it. Here is another example from
the same book: ‘Because the partial theories that we already have are sufficient
to make accurate predictions in all but the most extreme conditions,’ Hawking
writes, ‘the search for the ultimate theory of the universe seems difficult
to justify on practical grounds.’

Think about this statement. Do we really have theories that are sufficient
to make accurate predictions in all but the most extreme conditions? Are
these theories capable of making accurate predictions about, say, the changes
in Eastern Europe, or the winner of the Grand National? Would they be useful
to a marriage bureau trying to find the perfect partner? Are they even able
to make accurate predictions about a purely physical phenomenon such as
the weather? Of course, I realise that I am wilfully misunderstanding what
Hawking meant (and I do not in any way want to rubbish an interesting book
or to decry the intellectual importance of a unified theory). What I am
trying to demonstrate however, is that when Hawking talks about a theory
that would describe the whole Universe, what he actually means is a theory
that would describe only a small corner of it (and not a very important
corner either, at least from the human perspective). The unified theory
would not help us to resolve the dilemmas with which we struggle in everyday
life. It would not even be of much help to other scientists – such as biologists
– operating at different levels of explanation.

Levels of explanation are the key. Medieval philosophy spoke of a Great
Chain of Being, stretching from simple undifferentiated matter to God himself.
Above the level of inanimate matter, in the medieval scheme of things, is
the level of vegetative life which is made of matter but can grow and reproduce
in a way that simple matter cannot do. Above that is the level of animal
life, which possesses the essential qualities of vegetative life, but can
also move and act. Above that is the human level of being, which has all
the properties of matter, of vegetative life and of animal life, but in
addition has a soul – or self-awareness.

Such a way of looking at things is, I know, very alien to modern scientific
ways of thinking, but it does encapsulate a rather obvious truth that otherwise
tends to get lost. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts: you cannot
explain away something at one level by reference to a lower level. It is
inconceivable that anyone could ever explain the works of Shakespeare in
terms of physics, or explain animal behaviour in terms of subatomic particles.
Each level is real in its own right and no one has a right to say that the
world is nothing but subatomic particles, or behaviour is nothing but brain
physiology, or any of those other ‘nothing but’ statements which are the
basis of science’s most extravagant claims.

The truth is that science can answer only certain types of questions.
It is at its brilliant best at the lowest ‘levels of being’: simple matter
and energy and the basic building blocks of which they are made up. Science
goes on doing pretty well higher up the scale too, though it loses some
precision with each successive layer as its climbs through chemistry and
up into biology. By the time we get up to psychology, let’s face it, science
is rather less spectacularly successful (it remains useful, of course, but
general theories and precise predictions have been left far, far behind).

And then we get to the levels in which we actually live out our lives:
our human relationships, our aspirations, politics (micro and macro), personal
choices, moral dilemmas . . . And at this level (the most important one,
after all, from a human perspective) science has no precise answers, no
complete descriptions at all. At this level we have to find other ways of
thinking about the world, and all that science can offer is useful metaphors
and perhaps a certain open-mindedness and willingness to consider the facts
. . .

Science is wonderful indeed but it has its limitations. It will certainly
never ‘explain’ the Universe.

A little more modesty, ladies and gentlemen, please!

Chris Beckett is a social worker living in Cambridge.

‘I am helping to expand the total sum of human knowledge,’ you might
say, or you might point to some more practical benefit: ‘I am helping to
feed the world,’ ‘I am discovering newer and faster ways of communicating,’
‘My work will help doctors to save lives.’ Many of you, of course, will
be involved in the defence industry, and thus, in a sense, in the business
of shortening human lives, but no doubt you are contributing to the common
good all the same, in that you are helping to strengthen the cause of democracy
– or communism, or Islam, or whatever – which, of course, isin the long-term
interests of all humankind.

I would be willing to bet, though, that not many would think of saying
this: ‘I help to create myths.’ And yet the creation of myths is one of
the most important functions that scientists and technologists perform in
the modern world. Religion once provided the myths that helped people to
make senseof the world and their place in it, butpeople are increasingly
turning elsewhere. Where better than to scientists, with theirwealth of
explanations, their spectacularachievements, their proven mastery ofmany
apparent mysteries? If you doubt that scientific and technological achievements
are the stuff of mythology, consider heart transplants. These were – and
continue to be – the focus of an enormous amount of media interest. Is this
because a large number of people have a particular interest in the technical
problems involved? Of course not. Nor does the level of interest reflect
the number of lives saved, which is really quite small. No, what makes heart
transplants and other ‘medical miracles’ so compelling is that they touch
in such a vivid and dramatic way on some of the great eternal themes of
myth and story: the struggle between life and death, the soul snatched back
heroically from the edge of the abyss . . .

There are probably more cost-effective ways of spending money to save
lives, but that doesn’t matter. We want heart transplants and the like to
continue because we need these powerful mythological dramas to continue
to be enacted for us.

To take another example, perhaps the most famous one of all, consider
the landing of a man on the Moon. As has often been pointed out, the actual
scientific value of a manned Moon-landing was almost zero. Very little could
be learnt in that way that could not be learnt much more cheaply and easily
by other means such as unmanned probes. But to measure the success or failure
of the Moon landings in such terms is to miss their point completely. The
Moon landings were not about gathering dataor testing hypotheses; they were
abouttheatre, about the enactment of myths.

What were those myths? Well, in large measure they were myths of national
pride: America is the greatest country on Earth! We are invincible! Nothing
is impossible for us! But that is only one of many mythical themes that
were fed and nurtured by such a spectacular event. It was about the power
of humankind, the power of technology, our ability to overcome the apparently
impossible and to conquer not just Earth but the whole Universe. And yet
at the same time it was about the smallness of humankind, our vulnerability,
the fact that we inhabit a single small planet, surrounded by emptiness
. . .

In suggesting that Moon landings and such are about myths, I’m not saying
that this invalidates them. (We need myths – so why should the enactment
of myths be any less valid a motive than the advancement of knowledge?)
I’m simply drawing attention to the fact that projects that are ostensibly
scientific and technical may also have this completely different function.
And it is not only the very spectacular achievements such as heart transplants
and Moon landings that are involved in this. In one way or another the whole
body of scientific and technological endeavour is constantly feeding into
the myths by which we live. Moon landings and heart transplants are just
particularly obvious examples.

What about the myths themselves? They are rich, diverse and mutually
contradictory. Some of them flow out of the theories and discoveries of
scientists (think of the stream of images that have come out of biology:
images of webs and chains and homeostatic systems on the one hand; images
of struggle, competitiveness and individualism on the other). Others flow
out of the spectacle of the scientists themselves. With their awesome and
unprecedented powers, scientists are constantly fascinating. Sometimes they
are cast in the role of heroes, high priests, saviours; at other times in
the role of destroyers, necromancers, enemies of life . . .

Which mythical themes come to the fore is a matter over which scientists
could perhaps exercise some control, partly by choosing what kind of project
they become involved in, but also by giving some thought to the way that
science is presented to the rest of us, as some of the myths arise from
simplifications and misunderstandings.

Here are a few of the mythical themes that are propagated most frequently
in KK the name of science. (If you don’t like theword mythical, you could
call them lessons – or notions about the world – that are commonly drawn
from science.) These themes are not necessarily explicitly stated, but they
are implied in the way that scientific issues are presented – in popular
science books, in TV documentaries, in newspaper articles. Some of these
lessons are valuable, some dangerous, but take your pick!

(1) Scientists and technologists can solve all our problems. We can
leave everything to the experts.

(2) Science has unleashed forces that should have been left alone. It
has made us the agents of our own destruction.

(3) Humanity is part of a delicate living web. We can alter the balance
only with great care. We cannot stand alone.

(4) We are automata. We are the slaves of our chemistry and our environment.
We cannot change ourselves. We have no free will. Our sense of possessing
a ‘soul’ is illusory.

(5) Science gives us unlimited power. The Universe lies at our feet.
We can overcome all the apparent limits to human existence, including death.

(6) Human beings are part of the order of things, just as much as animals,
mountains, planets. There is only one world . . .

Science, of course, often comes into conflict with mythologies that
derive from other, nonscientific, sources (such as fundamentalist religion:
witness the struggle between creationism and evolutionary biology). But
more and more the struggle is not between scientific and nonscientific ways
of thinking, but between rival scientific myths. Consider the spectacle
of ecologists staging a sit-in outside a nuclear power plant. Both sides
would claim the mantle of science for their cause, just as in wars gone
by both sides would claim the mantle of true religion.

And this is a measure of the pervasiveness of scientific thought in
the modern world – and of the power scientists wield.

Chris Beckett is a social worker living in Cambridge.