Much the same as life on Earth evolved from ancient micro-organisms, life evolved on the asteroid, Xra - whether those organisms were endemic or deposited from collisions with outer space debris, in concert with the panspermia hypothesis. The evolving organisms began intelligently assembling themselves deep below the asteroid’s airless barren surface in a cavern at the center of the asteroid.
The general idea for this scenario, came from an episode of the original Star Trek television series. The aliens, in this presentation, live on a planet (man-made) where the inhabitants, after untold generations, think that their home is the only reality that exists. As the story develops, they learn that they are a part of an infinitely larger universe, and, they learn that they are destined for certain death (in order to instill the urgency required to get them to move from their current complacency) unless they find a way off their home onto a planet that had been targeted by their ancestors many generations before.
The alien characters in my novel face a similar fate, but with no existing design to the problem or its solution – just the circumstances brought about by the infinitely more complicated chaos of the universe. The alien characters, as a group, are studied and developed under the prism of anthropology. The development of politics, religion and science of the aliens are followed as they create an increasingly sophisticated society for themselves. For thousands of generations, the asteroid, Xra’s orbit take her out past a small black hole that disrupts the geology of the asteroid and unleashes the asteroid’s lava on their civilization. Every twelve thousand years, this event kills almost everyone – and certainly destroys their institutions. The Xrans are required to start over with just a few dazed and confused survivors and no competent way to warn future generations of this serial tragedy. This novel deals with the latest civilization and how they finally discover that there is a surface above their cavern. Because of an astrophysical anomaly, Xra is redirected and saved from its periodic near-fatal conjunction with the black hole. But in a cruel irony, Xra is captured in a decaying orbit around the Earth which will end up in certain death for the asteroid - and unless something can be done quickly - its population.
The idea for this episode came from Isaac Azimov’s classic short story, “Nightfall” where a planet, surrounded by a number of suns, is always bathed in sunlight. Then every two thousand years (or so) all of the suns except one are lined up on one side of the planet and the smallest sun is the lone provider of light on the other side of the planet. Since the planet is in continuous sunlight, its lone moon is never seen except in this particular solar lineup. Then the moon travels in front of the lone sun in an eclipse, plunging that side, and eventually the entire planet, as it rotates, into darkness. The population goes mad and burns down everything in their society for the light. The survivors all become insane, incapable of passing down this experience to the next emerging civilization. The folklore of the event is held as a cultish tale by some religious orders. And the whole two-thousand year cycle starts anew.
In my novel the aliens discover a way to Xra’s surface and begin to get an inkling that they are not the only Xran civilization to have inhabited the asteroid. They, however, at this point, have ‘bigger fish to fry’ as they discover that their home will vaporize as it eventually falls into Earth’s atmosphere. They will have but little time to work out a plan of survival and so they devote all of their scientific energy to finding a solution to their potentially fatal problem.
