Pushing back the alien frontier

Here is an interesting discussion on Baen writer Ryk Spoor’s LiveJournal about how our advancing knowledge of nearby star systems is endangering making it harder to use them in SF.

My take on the subject is: if it hasn’t been established that, say, Tau Ceti doesn’t have an Earthlike planet, go ahead and write that story where it has one.  As long as you’re not contradicting what we know at the time you write, you’re okay… even we find out something that invalidates it soon after it’s published.  Nobody laughs at Larry Niven just because his first story involved a Mercury that always keeps one face to the Sun, and soon afterwards we found out the real Mercury didn’t.  Were you up to date at the time of writing?  That’s the question.

Isaac Asimov once wrote a story about how humans would never reach the top of Mount Everest (it was home to a colony of Martians who killed anyone who came too near.)  Between the time he sold the story and the time of publication, Edmund Hillary successfully climbed Everest.  The magazine published it anyway!

I have to say, a little part of me will be disappointed when we get the dirt on Tau Ceti and find out it doesn't play host to Cherryh's Downbelow, or Niven's Plateau, or Dickson's Ceta...