Vega in fiction

General uses of Vega

• Qi Xi, "the night of sevens," festival honoring a Han dynasty legend. The young cowherd Niú Láng meets by chance and marries Zhī Nŭ the weaver girl, seventh daughter of the Celestial Goddess; the two live happily together and have a pair of children. The Goddess, furious that Zhī Nŭ has married a mere mortal, orders her home to resume her day job weaving colorful clouds. Niú Láng follows her, but is not unnoticed by the mother, who angrily uses her hairpin to scratch a wide river in the sky—the Milky Way—to separate the lovers forever. Once a year all the magpies in the world take pity on them and fly up to heaven to form a bridge over the star Deneb in Cygnus, so that they may be together for a single night.
• "French and English Tragedy", magazine article by the Rev. George Croly. Croley, in describing the white nights of St. Petersburg, writes To the ordinary eye the heavens, though clear, are almost starless; only brilliants like Vega and Arcturus have power to make an impression upon the retina. Summer midnight in the Russian capital is thus a simple twilight...
• Emily's Quest, novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Emily Starr and Teddy Kent have been friends since childhood, and as Teddy is about to leave to further his education as an artist, Emily believes that their friendship is blossoming into something more. On their last night together she sighs, Look at that star, Teddy – the one just over the youngest Princess. It’s Vega of the Lyre. I’ve always loved it. It’s my dearest among the stars. They vow to think of each other when they see this symbol of faithfulness in the heavens.
• "Talk of the Town", New Yorker feuilleton by E. B. White. White describes the "telescope man" of Bryant Park in New York: He charges ten cents for a look at the tip of the Empire State Building, and only five cents for a look at Vega, star of the first magnitude. The tip of the building, being not far away, is pleasantly comprehensible to his customers. Vega, being three times as remote as Sirius, merely gives them a feeling of cosmic despondency, a dizzy, uneasy moment in West Forty-second Street. They find it more comforting to pay five cents more, and not see so far.
• High Sierra, film written by John Huston and W. R. Burnett, and directed by Raoul Walsh. On his way to a planned heist in the Sierra Nevada mountains, Roy Earle meets Velma. Under the night sky one romantic evening, they gaze at the heavens: Look at the stars. I never knew there were so many stars in the sky… Roy looks up, then points to the zenith. See that bright blue star up there? That's Vega. See how it sparkles? It's in kind of a lopsided square with points running up... see it? That's the constellation Lyra. I see it. How do you know? A man I used to know, a pal of mine, learned me all about the sky. There wasn't much else to do where we was. Is that star always up there like that?
• A padlás, popular Hungarian language musical comedy written by :hu:Presser Gábor|Gábor Presser, :hu:Sztevanovity Dusán|Dusán Sztevanovity, and :hu:Horváth Péter |Péter Horváth, and directed by László Marton. Four ghosts roam the Earth from attic to attic, waiting for the ferryman :hu:Révész|Révész, who will conduct them to Vega, the star of "eternal beauty." Vega is where all dreams and memories live, and if they can get there, they will become beautiful forever.

Literature

• City at World's End, novel by Edmond Hamilton. Government Center on Vega IV is the nexus of galactic administration in this novel about the unremarkable, middle-class Earth city of Middletown hurled by a nuclear explosion to a dead world in the unimaginably far-distant future.
• Foundation, first novel in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Vega was the capital of the Vega Province in the Galactic Empire, one of the wealthiest provinces in the entire Galaxy. Until the revolt of the Anacreon Prefect, it traded with Terminus, capital of the Foundation. Salvor Hardin, the first mayor of Terminus City, considered the threat of being cut off from Vega to be one of the gravest perils faced by the nascent Foundation. One of the commodities Vega exported was tobacco, of notably high quality.
• Cities in Flight,, series of novels by James Blish. The Vega system is home to a civilization Blish names the Vegan Tyranny, which is blocking mankind's expansion into the galaxy. To fulfill their manifest destiny, men must defeat the Tyranny. The series' reflection of recent earthly events, and the fascistic nature of the Vegan Tyranny, exhibit Blish's pessimistic view of the cyclic nature of history, as influenced by his reading of Spengler's The Decline of the West. Blish later recycled these ideas in his novelization of "Tomorrow is Yesterday", an episode of '.
• The Stars My Destination, classic science fiction novel written by Alfred Bester. After his apotheosis in the burning cathedral, the legendary Gully Foyle teleports stark naked to the vicinity of several stars, including Vega: "Vega in Lyra... burning bluer than Rigel, planetless, but encircled by swarms of blazing comets whose gaseous trails scintillated across the blue-black firmament..." The interstellar "jaunting" sequence is typical of Bester's signature pyrotechnics, his quick successions of hard, bright images, and mingled images of decay and new life.
• Have Space Suit—Will Travel, juvenile novel by Robert A. Heinlein. "Vega V" is the home planet of an interstellar "nanny" civilization assigned to covertly mentor humanity when the Three Galaxies Federation becomes aware of our existence. Protagonist Kip Russell has rehabilitated an old space suit that comes in quite handy when he gets involved in an interplanetary kidnapping scheme. He and fellow victim Peewee Reisfeld are abducted first to the Moon, and then to Pluto, where he is seriously injured in their escape. Peewee's companion, the Vegan "Mother Thing," takes Kip to Vega V to be healed, and later to a tribunal in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud where he represents the human race.
• Andromeda: A Space Age Tale, English translation by George Hanna of the Russian language novel by Ivan Efremov. The Earth of the far future is a communist utopia, nonetheless able to send no more than a few infrequent space ships to the nearest star systems, since interstellar travel is limited by the speed of light. One of these near neighbors is Vega. The Earth expedition which reaches the Vega system finds it devoid of life. The Hour of the Bull, the sequel to Andromeda, confronts its 'communist utopia' with a 'capitalist dystopia' in a structure similar to that subsequently used by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Dispossessed.
• Agent of Vega, fixup written by James H. Schmitz from stories originally appearing in Astounding Science Fiction. In the far future, humans are building the Confederacy of Vega to replace the fallen Empire of Earth. The new empire includes mutated humans as well as non-humans. The enemies of the Confederacy are also a mix of men and aliens in a space opera setting that features Vega's Zone Agents. Conflict between the league and its adversaries involves both physical and telepathic weapons.
• Space Battle in the Vega Sector , Mutants in Action , The Secret of the Time Vault , and The Fortress of the Six Moons , installments 10-13 of the Perry Rhodan series of space-opera pulp novelettes, written by Walter Ernsting as by Clark Darlton, by Karl-Herbert Scheer as by K. H. Scheer, and by Kurt Mahr. In these installments of the long-running English version of the series, Rhodan comes to the aid of the inhabitants of Ferrol, one of Vega's 42 planets, who are enmeshed in a space war between the reptilian Topides and the decadent Arkonides. On Rofus, mutants help Perry gain control of a Topide battleship. His next exploit is to enter the Time Vault and discover the secrets of the methuselan inhabitants of Vega X. The battle against the Topides continues among the six moons of Vega XL, until finally Rhodan tricks his enemies into an "attack" on the Capella system in which they transit directly to the interior of the star itself.
• Demon Princes, series of five novels written by Jack Vance. In Vance's Oikumene universe, Vega is one of the three principal centers of human civilization. It has three uninhabitable inner planets and three habitable abecedarian planets:
• * Padraic, Mona, and Noaille are cinders of scorched stone, baking in the austere glare of the Great White Star. Tidally locked Noaille is notable for its rains of liquid mercury which fall on the dark side and flow to the hot side where they vaporize, to return once again to the dark side.
• * Aloysius. Its early history was dominated by rivalries between religious sects; the effects of the hatred and warfare persist to this day, especially in the countryside. The cities of Pontefract and New Wexford are galactic centers of finance and publishing—where Kirth Gersen runs his magazines Cosmopolis and Extant.
• * Boniface. " oceans are bedeviled by awful storms, the land masses are notable for an extravagant topography: vast plains supine to the force of winds and rain; mountains, caves, crags, chasms; broad rivers flowing from sea to sea."
• * Cuthbert. Called a "Bug-Hunter's Paradise", this humid and unpleasantly marshy world is but sparsely populated.
• This Immortal. novel by Roger Zelazny. In this post-apocalyptic novel, Arts Commissioner Conrad Nomikos—who may or may not be immortal, and who may or may not be a god—assumes the irksome task of escorting a Vegan grandee around the ruins of Earth, which is a popular tourist destination for those among the blue-skinned aliens with a hankering for primal thrills. The masterfully manipulative "immortal" isn't the only one with secrets, however; the Vegan harbors dark secrets of his own, and Earth-liberation rebels are trying to kill him. "Conrad Nomikos... resembles Herakles—whose labors the plot of the novel covertly replicates—but is certainly both the Hero of a Thousand Faces and the Trickster who mocks the high road of myth..."
• Procession In verse Polish poet Leszek Aleksander Moczulski and in song Marek Grechuta, Vega is constellation where probably living people: "Who, looking down to the Earth from Vega constellation will guess?"
• Contact, novel written by Carl Sagan with unacknowledged assistance from Ann Druyan. SETI researchers detect a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence—a transmitter array in orbit around the star Vega. As signal hunter Ellie Arroway breathlessly proclaims to a colleague over the telephone: "Yes, Vega is smack in the middle of the field of view. And we’re getting what looks like prime number pulses…" After an arduous decoding process, Ellie and her colleagues discover and implement the plans for a wormhole transport device that carries five explorers to the center of the galaxy. There they speak at length with supernal sentiences, but can bring back no proof of the contact—so that when they return home nobody believes their experiences.
• Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, the first two novels in the Hyperion Cantos written by Dan Simmons. Martin Silenus, the Poet of the Hyperion tales, survives tortured formative years growing up in the ambit of the marginally effective Rifkin Atmospheric Protectorate on Heaven’s Gate, "a minor world circling the star Vega... poisonous world a farcaster connection to Sol System..." Too late for poor Martin, Heaven's gate is terraformed by the Hegemony of Man into an Edenic garden planet, and kept that way in the face of considerable difficulty thanks to its rich mineral resources—until the collapse of the farcaster network and the fall of the Hegemony. In the apocalypse, "...the worst has happened... The Ousters are invading the Web. Heaven’s Gate is being destroyed...". The once beautiful world is reverted by TechnoCore cybrids posing as Ousters into a smoldering slag heap.
• Diaspora, novel by Greg Egan. The Diaspora in the novel consists of a collection of one thousand exact digital copies of the Carter-Zimmerman polis, deployed toward stars in all directions in hopes of improving humankind's understanding of the physics behind an unpredicted gamma ray burst that wiped out most of Earth's inhabitants. Vega is one of the target stars, and a C-Z polis encounters alien life on Orpheus''', its sole planet.

  Film and television

Comics

• Omega Men, DC Comics superhero series created by Marv Wolfman and Joe Staton. Interstellar war rages in the Vega star system. The planet Tamaran, Vega's 8th planet, the home of the enslaved Princess Koriand'r of the Teen Titans and her captor and renegade sister Komand'r, is destroyed in the fighting. The planet Rann, formerly orbiting Alpha Centauri and briefly orbiting Polaris is given a new home occupying the Vegan orbit once followed by Tamaran.
• Green Lantern, DC Comics superhero series created by Bill Finger and Martin Nodell. The Green Lantern Corps does not have jurisdiction in the Vega star system due to a treaty between the Guardians of the Universe and Agent Orange. However, one of the new laws of the Green Lantern Corps lifts that restriction.

  Games

• Traveller, role-playing game designed by Marc Miller and published by GDW. In this wide-ranging game the players' skills, tasks, gear, ships, and worlds are all built from tables using dice as a randomizing element. The worlds display a wide spectrum of conditions, from barren planetoid moons to large water worlds, from uncolonized territory to planets with tens of billions of people. The Vegan system governs an autonomous region within the Imperium several parsecs in radius, centered on the star Vega.
• Portal, interactive novel written by Rob Swigart and produced by Brad Fregger. The player, in the role of the astronaut protagonist, returns from a failed 100-year voyage to 61 Cygni to find the Earth depopulated. Cars are rusted and covered with moss, buildings are crumbling and overgrown, the streets are strewn with debris, and the human race has utterly vanished. The player happens upon a barely functioning computer terminal and begins playing the game, piecing together fragments of information, until he discovers the secret: a mass human migration in great ships powered by the "axion" drive, through a hyperspace portal to the Realm of Vega 26 light-years away. Mankind is waiting to return...
• Wing Commander, computer game designed by Chris Roberts and published by Origin Systems. The player takes the role of a nameless pilot aboard the TCS Tiger's Claw, a Bengal-class Strike Carrier. He quickly rises through the ranks of the flight wing, and eventually leads a strike on the Kilrathi High Command starbase in the Venice system. This action is called the Vega Campaign, since it all takes place in a region of the galaxy known as the Vega Sector whose "sector star" is Vega.
• ' and ', computer games written by David Braben et al. The Vega system is one of the biggest tourist traps in the Federation thanks to its jungle planet Tracy's Haven, famous for dramatic scenery and dangerous wildlife. While it is a politically stable system, Vega nonetheless maintains a laissez faire policy towards contraband: Goods banned elsewhere find a lively market here, with the only proscribed lines of business being slaves, narcotics, and nerve gas.
• Escape Velocity, computer game by Ambrosia Software. The Vega System is the site of a major fuel refinery.
• FreeSpace 2, combat simulation computer game designed by Dave Baranec et al, and published by Volition When the brutal Shivans invade, the Terrans join with their erstwhile rivals the Vasudans to form the Terran Vasudan Alliance. Vega starts out as a Terran colony, but is an early victim of the first Shivan invasion—requiring that the node connecting it to Capella be collapsed as a defensive measure.
• Escape Velocity Nova, computer game developed and published by Ambrosia Software. The Vega System contains the planet Las Vegas. Unlike its terrestrial namesake, the planet is conservative and austere.
• Pirate Galaxy, MMOG developed by Gustaf Stechmann and published by Splitscreen Studios. Players operate spaceships, explore various planets, mine minerals from orbit, and fight other players and computer enemies in planetary combat. The first-time player starts off on the nearly forgotten planet Kalebesh in the Vega system as a smuggler, learning the rudiments of the game and getting his first missions, which eventually lead him to the world Axiom. When the player proves his mettle, he proceeds via stargate to the Antares system where he pursues bigger and better adventures.
• Vega, along with other stars in the Winter Triangle, Summer Triangle, and Winter Hexagon, comprise parts of the Tellarknight archetype in the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game. Together with the other defining vertices of the Summer Triangle, Altair and Deneb, "Satellarknight Vega" is released in the Duelist Alliance Booster Pack, with Stellarknight Delteros representing the Summer Triangle itself.