The Ihrdizu have evolved on Genji's moonside from an amphibian precursor, a fact which still shows in their poikilothermic regulation of body temperature. There are three sapient races in the system, the Ihrdizu and the himatids on Genji and the Chupchups on Chujo.
Murasaki anderson sc full#
From the hemisphere where the companion world Genji can be seen it hangs in the sky as a globe of 6° 20' diameter, and when full gives over 320 times the light of the full Moon as seen from Earth. Because most of this chilly planet's water is locked in permafrost and glaciers, the atmosphere (which has a sea-level pressure of 0.7 bar, equivalent to about 3,650 m altitude on Earth) is not only thin but also uncomfortably dry. The mean surface temperature is only +5 ☌. This is the smaller world, with 0.76 Earth masses at 94% of its diameter, and 85% of its surface gravity. Only at 5,800 meters (an altitude found on this planet only in the form of a few small highlands that are cold and arid) the atmospheric pressure drops to Earth-standard 1 bar. Although humans in good condition can physically accommodate to the high gravity, the sea level air pressure of 3.1 bars which results from this gravity (as per the barometric formula) requires artificial decompression for safe breathing. The mean surface temperature is +20 ☌, slightly warmer than Earth. The side of the planet that constantly faces its companion world Chujo ("Moonside") is mostly land, the other hemisphere ("Starside") is mostly ocean. Genji is a Super-Earth but only moderately so: it has 2.8 times the mass and 1.36 times the diameter of Earth, and 1.5 times Earth's gravity. Both planets have plate tectonics, causing most of their carbon dioxide being bound in their crusts, and have oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres of Earth-like composition. From this distance the star appears as a disk of 1° 40' diameter, almost three times as large as the Sun (or the Moon) when observed from Earth. This constellation orbits Murasaki within the habitable zone, at a distance of only 0.223 astronomical units (sidereal year, 66 Earth days) where the planets receive about the same amount of total irradiation Mars gets from the Sun however, with a spectral power distribution shifted to much longer wavelengths. They orbit around their center of mass in 91 hours in locked rotation, which minimizes the effects of the huge tidal forces which they exert on each other. The twin terrestrial planets are separated by an average distance of only 156,000 km (about 40% of the Earth-Moon distance).
(The star is in fact very similar to Gliese 581, now known to have a planetary system.)
Poul Anderson, who had a degree in physics, worked out the physical framework for the anthology based on the characteristics of HD36395 as they were known in the early 1990s: one third of Earth Sun's mass, 82% of its diameter, spectral type M1 with a photosphere temperature of 3,400 K and a maximum emission in the near infrared. The larger of the two planets is Genji, named after Hikaru Genji, the hero of her novel Genji Monogatari the smaller one is named Chujo, after Genji's close friend Tō no Chūjō.įictional physical characteristics of the Murasaki system Because the system had been first explored by a Japanese robot interstellar probe the star has been given the proper name Murasaki (after the famous Japanese writer, Murasaki Shikibu). The scenery is set in a fictional double planet system in orbit around an actually existing red dwarf star (HD36395 also known as Gliese 205 and Wolf 1453 ), about 20 light years from the Solar System. It is the first anthology of this type to be entirely conceived and written by winners of the Nebula Award. Murasaki is a 1992 " shared universe" hard science fiction novel in six parts to which Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin, Nancy Kress and Frederik Pohl each contributed one chapter it was edited by Robert Silverberg.
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