Black holes have also been portrayed as ways to travel through space rather than time, acting as entrances to wormholes in works such as the 1974 novel The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. Ī concept portrayed in many early works featuring black holes is that of gravitational time dilation-whereby time passes more slowly closer to a black hole as a consequence of general relativity-seen in works like Poul Anderson's 1968 short story ' Kyrie' as well as Frederik Pohl's 1977 novel Gateway and the rest of his Heechee series the opposite effect of using a black hole for the purpose of time travel to the past is depicted in the 1967 Star Trek episode ' Tomorrow Is Yesterday'. Later works such as the 1975 Space: 1999 episode 'Black Sun' have occasionally done likewise, and a few have even depicted black holes being outright weaponized, one example being the 1982 novel The Space Eater by David Langford. Smith's 1928 story The Skylark of Space and its 'black sun', typically portrayed them as hazards to spacefarers. The earliest stories featuring what would later be called black holes, such as E. Black holes, objects whose gravity is so strong that nothing including light can escape them, have been depicted in fiction since before the term was coined by John Archibald Wheeler in the late 1960s.

Starbound changing character appearance