Fiction book about a tiny black hole?

September 24, 2005 12:09 AM

This is going to be a long shot, but I'm trying to figure out the name of a fiction book I read around 20 years ago about a tiny black hole eating chunks out of the earth.

I don't remember a great deal about the book, but I think the opening chapter features a woman who is in an airplane and has a chunk taken out of her leg from the blackhole, but it takes a while for her to figure out that's what it is. The story revolves around her and some other people who are trying to save the world from this tiny black hole. The woman who got hit with it in the beginning of the book starts suffering from radiation sickness or something like that. Does this sound even remotely familiar to anyone? I believe the cover was mostly gray with some pink in it.

posted by Kimberly to Media & Arts (38 answers total)

Possibly David Brin's Earth, but I don't remember any woman getting hit by a black hole.
posted by nmiell at 12:23 AM on September 24, 2005

Response by poster: Yeah I checked that one out, but the novel I read wasn't set in the distant future and it was a lot shorter--a no-brainer novel that was a quick read around 250 or 300 pages.
posted by Kimberly at 12:30 AM on September 24, 2005

Shit. I read the same book in the early 90's. Had a silver cover. A blind character who manpulated the black hole with asteroids like he was playing a game of billiards.

Sold it.
posted by sourwookie at 12:38 AM on September 24, 2005

Still haven't found a source, yet my hindbrain is saying "Dark Matter."
posted by sourwookie at 12:45 AM on September 24, 2005

Singularity?
posted by sourwookie at 12:52 AM on September 24, 2005

Response by poster: Ugh! That sounds a lot like it, except for the fact that the black hole was actually circling the earth taking pieces out of it and I think the earth was going to collapse because of it or something like that ... and because "Singularity" was published last year.

So close!
posted by Kimberly at 12:54 AM on September 24, 2005

Response by poster: I'm still looking, but I found Google Print, which rocks your mommy. Maybe you remember something in the actual book to search for?
posted by Kimberly at 1:14 AM on September 24, 2005

The Forge of God?
posted by kindall at 1:29 AM on September 24, 2005

Response by poster: Nope. There were no aliens or anything. It was semi-science-fiction in that it was about this black hole, but it was in contemporary society.
posted by Kimberly at 1:34 AM on September 24, 2005

First search to check it's not been asked before, and then post to rec.arts.sf.written (Google groups link) and put something like "YASID: Mini black hole" in the title.

YASID is 'Yet Another Story IDentification'. The group gets a lot of these sort of questions and the people there are expert.
posted by edd at 2:19 AM on September 24, 2005

I don't think this is it, but your description brings to mind Stephen Kings "The Langoliers".
posted by RoseovSharon at 2:31 AM on September 24, 2005

There was a Larry Niven (?) short story about this, as I recall. It's been decades, though, but that might narrow it down.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 2:34 AM on September 24, 2005

I'm quite certain I read this too. Do you remember a blind character or a character whose vision was artificially enhanced? If I remember, he's the one that did all the physics calculations to capture the micro-black hole. I read it in the early nineties.

It seems to have been pretty unremarkable as I did read it and retained so little.
posted by sourwookie at 8:20 AM on September 24, 2005

Niven's story was "The Hole Man." It's not the story the questioner is asking about.
posted by SPrintF at 9:16 AM on September 24, 2005

The Krone Experiment by J. Craig Wheeler? I vaguely recall reading this novel in high school, so the details aren't very clear. I do remember a black hole orbiting Earth's core and slowly eating away at the planet. If you visit the link, the author's son apparently shot an independent adaptation of the book.
posted by nightengine at 9:20 AM on September 24, 2005

Erm, I vaguely remember a Choose Your Own Adventure story with exactly this premise. I don't remember the title, however.
posted by killdevil at 9:47 AM on September 24, 2005

In addition to "The Hole Man", Niven wrote "The Borderland of Sol", another story featuring a mini black hole. It's also not the one that Kimberly wants.
posted by Zonker at 1:02 PM on September 24, 2005

Gregory Benford's Artifact?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:03 PM on September 24, 2005

It's Stephen King's The Langoliers.
posted by iconomy at 1:11 PM on September 24, 2005

The Langoliers didn't have anything to do with black holes, did it? Sure, there was a plane, but that's where the similarity ended. Wasn't the Langoliers the one where everyone disappeared except for a few people?

While I don't recall anything about a woman and her leg, this sounds an awful lot like Gregory Benford's Eater.
posted by thanotopsis at 1:33 PM on September 24, 2005

It was not Langoliers. Though an enjoyable book about fuzzy black things eating the earth, sort of, it's not the book the poster is looking for.
posted by whatzit at 1:48 PM on September 24, 2005

I never saw the movie, but the book The Langoliers was about black holes that ate up people and things as they bounced along. The story starts out on an airplane which flies into another dimension where the black holes just keep bouncing around and creating emptiness wherever they bounce. They "eat" the legs off of people by bouncing across them. People from the plane get eaten by the holes as they try to run towards something - a terminal I think.

I think it's probably not The Langoliers though, after I reread the question. Kimberly said it was a book, and The Langoliers is a short story from Four Past Midnight.
posted by iconomy at 1:48 PM on September 24, 2005

The Langoliers wasn't about black holes, rather it was (vaguely) about time travel. A plane passes through a portal to the past. Only those who are asleep or blind survive. When they land, everyone on Earth is missing, and everything seems washed out and lifeless. They soon discover that they have travelled into the immediate past, just a moment before our present frame of reference. The langoliers are creatures which, for lack of better terminology, "eat" the past.

In any event, it's definitely not the story the original post refers to.
posted by nightengine at 1:59 PM on September 24, 2005

It doesn't match Artifact, and I don't think it could be Eater either - the hole is too big in Eater for it to just do in a woman's leg and Benford tends to have sufficiently accurate science in his books for him not to just have the hole do that regardless.
posted by edd at 2:00 PM on September 24, 2005

This reminded me a lot of Larry Niven's short story "The Hole Man" (synopsis and excerpt here.) I can't find my copy of the book that contains it but if I recall correctly, a team of scientists on another planet release a black hole that kills a man (as it drops through him) and then goes back and forth, slowly eating the planet.
posted by Monster_Zero at 2:20 PM on September 24, 2005

I do not remember the name or author but a few more pieces of info about the book that I think they are talking about.

The woman is on a plane when she gets hit, it punches a hole in hand and the plane.


Spoiler: The solution comes via antimatter that the president of her company orders before he dies with out telling any one.
posted by jumpsuit_boy at 5:07 PM on September 24, 2005

It's not John Varley's Millennium, is it?
posted by Clay201 at 5:52 PM on September 24, 2005

IS it Thrice Upon a Time by James P Hogan?
posted by darkmatter at 6:33 PM on September 24, 2005

Millennium is way off base, nothing to do with black holes, rather time travel. (was a crappy movie as well)
posted by edgeways at 7:11 PM on September 24, 2005

I checked all my books in storage. Gone.

Silver/grey cover.

Micro-black hole.

Woman pierced by black hole on airplane. Hawking radiation.

Blind man who devises means of using asteroids to nudge orbit of the black hole.

Captured in anti-matter "bottle" or something of the like.

I've read all the books the others have mentioned. I know it's none of those.

This will drive me fucking nuts.
posted by sourwookie at 7:14 PM on September 24, 2005

I think I have it, The Krone Experiment. By J. Craig Wheeler.

Yes?
posted by edgeways at 7:47 PM on September 24, 2005

Best answer: Never read it, but I like Googling things. It's got to be "The Doomsday Effect" by Thomas Wren (or Thomas T. Thomas)?
posted by easternblot at 8:16 PM on September 24, 2005

Response by poster: YES!!! That's it!! It's Doomsday Effect. Thank you *so* much!!

I appreciate everyone looking. It's been driving me absolutely crazy. Now, to run out and buy it! You guys rock.
posted by Kimberly at 9:12 PM on September 24, 2005

Ask MetaFilter rules!
posted by RoseovSharon at 9:23 PM on September 24, 2005

Yay! I found it by googling the phrase: book "tiny black hole" and then that title was in a list of books about black holes on a cached site, with a super short description. I entered the title in Google again, and that longer description came up.
posted by easternblot at 9:27 PM on September 24, 2005

Response by poster: easternblot, you are my hero.
posted by Kimberly at 11:44 PM on September 24, 2005

On that page that EasternBlot linked to, scroll down to the desciption of Crygender...it's like Thomas T. Thomas is using They Fight Crime! to come up with plotlines.

(Not that there's anything wrong with that...)
posted by Ian A.T. at 11:53 PM on September 24, 2005

Read it. It sucked.

However easternblot is a hero.
posted by sourwookie at 12:28 AM on September 25, 2005