The Sargasso Sea has taken on mythical proportions in nautical fiction. A region of the North Atlantic surrounded by ocean currents, its waters are relatively calm and perfect for growing forests of sargassum seaweed. The same currents that form the sea have been known to drive ships and other debris into the gyre, while the seaweed matts can trap such vessels and they’re unlikely to drift out again. As a result, the area is known as a graveyard for shipping, and the southwest corner of the Sargasso Sea has become known as the Bermuda Triangle, famous for the number of vehicles that have vanished there. Perhaps unsurprisingly this idea - that certain regions may attract debris and form a trap for ships - found traction when nautical concepts were relocated to the new depths of space. Such sargassos of space are, in fact, remarkably common in science fiction.

Sargasso Asteroids.

The many miniature worlds of the asteroid belt presented an interesting opportunity for the transposition of sargassos to new locations. In The Beast of Space, a short story by F E Hardant published in 1941, an asteroid prospector follows a distress call to the Asteroid Moira. Making his way into a large internal cave he finds:

“SPACESHIPS! The room was packed with them - all sizes, old and new. A veritable sargasso. At first, he thought they might be craft belonging to the nameless inhabitants of this world, but, as he approached them, he recognised Terrestrial identifications.”

“None had crashed; all ships were in perfect order. But all were deserted.”

As it turns out, the distress call was simply a lure, sent out by a silicon being which forms the asteroid itself. This does not, of course, stop the prospector from finding a genuine young woman to rescue from mortal peril, as was expected at the time. In this context, the asteroid Moira is as much a tribute to another sea myth - the Sirens of the Mediterranean - as it is reminiscent of the Sargasso Sea. While the latter is a natural phenomenon, the sirens are female spirits who deliberately lure ships (and the sailors they contain) to their doom. While I won’t go into them here, other science fictional sirens can be found in examples such as the animated series Ulysses 31 (which transposes the entire greek mythos into space, TV anime, 1981) and comedy series Red Dwarf episode “Psirens” (BBC TV, 1993).

Far more complex and influential in the history of science fiction is another sargasso asteroid. Published in 1956, Alfred Bester’s novel The Stars My Destination (aka Tiger! Tiger!) tells the story of unskilled spaceman Gully Foyle. Abandoned on a wrecked ship by his employers, Foyle escapes and gradually transforms himself in order to gain the education, wealth and status necessary to seek revenge. A key location in this story is an asteroid that appears early in the novel when his desperate escape takes him into the asteroid belt

“Of the thousands, known and unknown, most unique to the Freak Century was the Sargasso Asteroid, a tiny planet manufactured of natural rock and wreckage, salvaged by its inhabitants in the course of two hundred years.

They were savages, the only savages of the twenty-fourth century; descendants of a research team of scientists that had been lost and marooned in the asteroid belt two centuries before when their ship had failed.”

These savages call themselves the Scientific People and chant their ancestor’s formulae. Surprised to find a survivor, they tattoo Foyle’s face with a tiger mask while he is unconscious, reshaping his self-image and the way others perceive him, and changing the course of his life. Even after the tattoo is removed, it reappears as a white mask when Foyle becomes agitated.

Sargasso Spaces

Moving from asteroidal scales to entire regions of the Solar System, accounts of space sargassos started firmly in the pulp era, where they presented opportunities for space men to demonstrate their courage and problem-solving ingenuity.

The Sargasso of Space by Edmund Hamilton was published in the September 1931 edition of Astounding. Hamilton places his sargasso further out, in the orbit of Neptune, where “the pulls of the sun and the outer planets exactly balance each other”. Such lagrange points - where gravitational forces between two bodies cancel - do exist, but any large third object tends to unbalance them, and in the outer solar system, Jupiter presents a significant perturber.

In any case, this is a future in which civilians routinely cruise between the planets. When the freighter Pallas loses power, she drifts into the area and again finds they must search a myriad of derelicts for the resources they need: in this case fuel to replace the supply lost in a leak. Like other examples, they also discover survivors amongst the wrecks - the crew (but not officers) of the passenger vessel Martian Queen. As becomes clear, its crew had mutineed just a month earlier, killing everyone but a young woman. As is inevitable in this kind of story, the female survivor must be rescued by the dashing officers of the Pallas before they make their escape using the salvaged fuel.

Other stories follow a similar pattern. Published in 1956, The Graveyard of Space by Milton Lesser (published in Imagination, April 1956) describes an unsuccessful asteroid mining couple whose run-down ship is drawn into a region of derelict ships somewhere on an orbit between the Asteroid Belt and Mars. Taking damage on the initial approach, they must search the derelicts for a replacement radar device. In doing so they have an interesting discussion of the origins of the region:

"No one knows for sure about the sargasso," he said, wanting to talk, wanting to dispel his own fear so he would not communicate it to her as he took the spacesuits down from their rack and began to climb into one. "They don't think it's anything but the ships, though. It started with a few ships. Then more. And more. Trapped by mutual gravity. It got bigger and bigger and I think there are almost a thousand derelicts here now. There's talk of blasting them clear, of salvaging them for metals and so on. But so far the planetary governments haven't co-operated."

"But how did the first ships get here?"

"It doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference. One theory is ships only, and maybe a couple of hunks of meteoric debris in the beginning. Another theory says there may be a particularly heavy small asteroid in this maze of wrecks somewhere—you know, superheavy stuff with the atoms stripped of their electrons and the nuclei squeezed together, weighing in the neighborhood of a couple of tons per square inch. That could account for the beginning, but once the thing got started, the wrecked ships account for more wrecked ships and pretty soon you have—a sargasso."

Nuclear matter or not, the region holds more hazards than simply debris. While exploring the wrecked ships for the equipment they need, a ragged, barely-human survivor gives the protagonist a chance to save his wife. This heals a rift between them and allows Lesser to draw an analogy between being stranded in the mire of ruined ships and being stranded in the miscommunications and tensions of a failing marriage.

Sargasso of the Stars by Frederick A Kummer Jr appeared in the summer 1941 edition of Planet Stories. In this case, the protagonist’s ship is drawn into the sargasso region not accidentally but on a deliberate course, in search of a lost love. Unsurprisingly his crew is not impressed:

“Our destination is this." He indicated a shaded area forming the apex of a vague triangle of which Mars and Jupiter were the other angles. "This area is known, for want of a better name, as the Magnetic Spot. Ships passing near it report radio disturbances, variations in their instruments. And that's where we're going! Any more questions?"

"The ... the Magnetic Spot?" Seltzsky, the wizened little navigator, cried. "But.... Good God! Every ship that goes near it disappears! Dozens, hundreds of 'em! The Valerian, the Explorer, the Io! Warships, liners, freighters! You're mad! Only two months ago, the Cosmic...."

In fact the Spot here proves to be a planetoid with an unusually strong magnetic field. Rather surprisingly, it also proves to have a breathable atmosphere, and is covered in accreted ferrous asteroids as well as metal-hulled spaceships. As well as finding the girl in need of rescue, they find survivors who have clearly been there longer and fared less well: “Human, they were, yet at the same time, grim travesties on human beings. Clad in rags, hair long and matted, beards streaked with filth, they seemed the most degenerate, revolting dregs of mankind.”

In fact, they’re the survivors and descendents of victims stranded during two centuries of human spaceflight, and inevitably become an automatic enemy for the hero. Despite its rather dated gender and class attitudes, the denouement of this story is interesting in that it actually employs some decent physics: the hull of a starship is heated to red hot, at which point the iron can’t maintain its magnetic domains and the ship is able to escape the magnetic thrall.

Moving away from the pulps, Dan Dare - Pilot of the Future, hero of the eponymous comic strip in the Eagle, encountered a sargasso in the inner solar system in the midst of the “Reign of the Robots” (comic, 1957, written by Frank Hampson and Alan Stranks). Being transported from the Treen-occupied Earth to Venus, Dare makes a prison break in a small craft and finds himself in an unexplored region of the inner Solar System. Here he discovers ships dating from the dawn of the space age mingled with others barely off the drawing board. As he notes:

“Mm! Of course, since space travel started, masses of ships have been lost. They all had to go somewhere - and it looks as if this is it!”

Dare also discovers “Crusoe” and “Friday”, two Spacefleet officers who drifted into the region after their own ship became disabled some years before and have survived by scavenging amongst the wrecked vessels. Together they are able to recover and fuel a long-lost ship and launch it back into the fight against the Mekon.

Sargasso Sectors

The narratives of space sargassos certainly weren’t restricted to the Earth’s own solar system. Poul Anderson clearly loved writing about the future of humans in space, including their gradual establishment of an interstellar empire. His Sargasso of Lost Starships appeared in the January 1952 issue of Planet Stories. The narrative follows an imperial starship that sets out to explore a dark nebula into which many ships have vanished, despite its bad reputation on local worlds.

“Even the densest nebula is a hard vacuum; but tons upon incredible tons of cosmic dust and gas, reaching planetary and interstellar distances on every hand, will blot out the sky. It was like rushing into an endless, bottomless hole.”

In fact the nebula proves to have a planet orbiting an old red dwarf star at its heart, and the planet hosts an insane ancient civilisation with advanced mental abilities, who have captured and crash-landed many spacecraft but are unable to use them. The story’s protagonist must decide whether to side with the aliens, or with the imperialist officers who forced him to accompany the exploration - with the inevitable woman to love on either side. Again, the role of the female antagonist is an example of the siren myth mingling with much later stories of the sargasso sea.

Andre Norton’s Sargasso of Space (novel, 1955) has a similar theme, but a very different feel. This story is set in Norton’s distant future (appearing in a number of her science fiction novels) in which mankind is a long-settled, multi-planet species, encountering from time to time the debris of the long-gone Forerunner race, and responsibility for deep space is nicely apportioned between Survey, Patrol and Trade. The narrative follows the crew of an independent Trade ship who bid at auction for the trading rights to a mostly unexplored world, Limbo. When they reach it, desperate to recoup their outlay on the rights, a panoply of crashed spaceships soon provide evidence that there is something odd about the planet.

Soon, the abduction of one of the crew leads to the further realisation that other humans are abroad on the surface. In fact, a still-functioning Forerunner installation buried under a mountain range has been co-opted by pirates and is used to bring unwary ships crashing down from space to be looted (although buried debris suggests that the machine has operated at random and out of control for millennia before it was ever found by humanity). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the traders dub the planet Limbo a sargasso world and, as in the novel’s title, the sargasso of space.

Another, different kind of sargasso appears in James Blish’s Sargasso of Lost Cities (novella, 1953; later incorporated in Earthman, Come Home, novel, 1955). In Blish’s Cities in Flight universe, the discovery of forcefields and antigravity devices known as spindizzies allow entire urban areas to desert Earth and become nomadic. Two millenia later, they travel from planet to planet selling technical services and expertise in exchange for resources or a currency backed by the rare element germanium. Returning from a long trip and in need of repair, New York discovers that the galaxy-wide economy has collapsed and germanium has been devalued, leaving them destitute. The solar system where it hoped to find services and employment now hosts more than three hundred desperate cities, crowded for energy around a red dwarf sun and begging for work [1].

It’s interesting to note that, despite the novella’s title, the Sargasso Sea is never referenced in the text. Instead the cluster of cities is described as a ‘jungle’ - a term for a shanty town of displaced or destitute people such as New York’s Hooverville of the Great Depression. This example is also interesting in that the cities cluster together as a result of economic and social pressures, rather than physical ones. All are capable of leaving the system - there’s simply nowhere to go, at least until the king of the jungle, the Mayor of Buda-Pesht, proposes a destination [2]. After this, New York’s City Mayor executes his own plan to escape the situation - albeit a rather convoluted one.

Interstellar examples aren’t limited to written science fiction either. Comedic science fiction cartoon Futurama took a less serious look at the issue in the episode “Mobius Dick” (TV, 2011). This introduced the idea of the Bermuda Tetrahedron as a space where ships - including an earlier vessel run by the crew’s own company, Planet Express - vanish. When the current Planet Express crew takes a shortcut through the same region, the culprit turns out to be a four-dimensional space whale who “only breaches into our three dimensions to hunt and fill its lungs with vacuum”. The premise here is really just an excuse to play out the Moby Dick narrative in space, and to address the series’ usual theme of how contemporary ideas might become warped and modified over the next millennium. It’s nonetheless an amusingly different perspective.

The more serious 1975-1977 television series Space:1999 (produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson for ITV) followed the adventures of Moonbase Alpha and its crew after the Moon is ejected from Earth orbit by a nuclear explosion [3]. In the episode “Dragon’s Domain”, the past returns to haunt one Alphan crew member, Tony Cellini, when the runaway moon encounters a spaceship graveyard. On a mission to the newly discovered Oort Cloud world of Ultra, five years before, he’d found the same set of derelict ships and witnessed a tentacled alien monster consuming his shipmates. Now his own former ship is one of the derelicts, and he’s determined to get revenge.

The internal logic of the series is not entirely consistent at the best of times and here it’s unclear how the region of derelict ships moves from a distant solar orbit (beyond Pluto) to Alpha’s current location (described in the dialogue as three months travel from the nearest star) - although, to be fair, one character does call out the unlikeliness of the whole affair, without proposing an explanation. The creature at the heart of it does seem to have psychic powers and siren vibes, as memories of it begin influencing Cellini long before the ships of its former victims are sighted. On the other hand, there’s no sign in the man’s first encounter that any actual lure was used except the derelict alien ships themselves.

Changing universes (both at a meta level and in the narrative), we find another spaceship graveyard and another siren in the Doctor Who episode “The Doctor’s Wife” (BBC TV, 2011). Here the Doctor is lured into taking the TARDIS out of our universe and into an offshoot pocket. The entity responsible lives on devouring TARDISes, and the asteroid on which it is based is a graveyard of broken vessels. The parallels to the Sargasso Sea are perhaps weaker than in some of the examples above, but in the best space sargasso tradition, the Doctor is forced to scavenge amidst the wreckage for the resources he needs to escape.

Still stranger sargassos are found in the Star Trek universe. Star Trek: The Animated Series continued the voyages of the USS Enterprise after the end of the original series. The episode “The Time Trap” is introduced with the usual captain’s log entry:

Captain's log, stardate 5267.2. We have just entered the Delta Triangle, a vast, uninhabited sector of our galaxy in which a high number of mysterious disappearances of starships have been recorded since ancient times. The Enterprise has been assigned to the mission of surveying this area and, if possible, determining the cause of these disappearances.

Unfortunately as both the Enterprise and a Klingon battlecruiser, the Klothos, enter the triangle they find themselves drawn through a spacetime anomaly into another pocket universe where ships from dozens of spacefaring species have become stranded, and where time passes slowly so the crews live for centuries. The survivors have formed a panel known as the Council of Elysia which enforces peace and cooperation. Despite their ongoing conflict, the Enterprise and the Klothos are forced to cooperate in order to escape, leaving the other ships behind them. This compelling idea was returned to in the Starfleet Corps of Engineers (SCE) novel series. In Where Time Stands Still by Dayton Ward and Kevin Dillmore (eBook, 2004) two different SCE ships, the USS Lovell and the USS da Vinci, are sent back into the Triangle to try to open the pocket universe, a century apart, in order to first contact and then deliver a cultural artefact to the sole survivor of a now-extinct clan. The power of the idea of this spaceship graveyard is apparent; another Star Trek novel series, the Department of Temporal Investigation, also visited Elysia in the novel ST:DTI - Forgotten History (Christopher L Bennett, 2012). This time the goal is scientific rather than cultural; the temporal investigators on the USS Everett are keen to discover how Elyria’s slow time actually works and its potential effects. In fact they determine that it may be a region with low entropy.

Apart from Elysia, another Star Trek sargasso can also be found in the SCE series. In Sargasso Sector by Paul Kupperberg (eBook, 2004) the titular engineering corps are assigned the task of clearing a region of a vast accumulation of starship wreckage, a lightyear long and 10 au wide, in order to allow passage for a generation ship en route to found a new colony. The crew of the USS da Vinci actually discuss the naming of the region, equating the ring of ocean currents that leave the Sargasso Sea becalmed to the “fairly unusual confluence of events” which cause derelict ships to gather in the area:

“Ringing the Sargasso Sector are, in no particular order, one perfect binary black hole system, one system of unusually high magnetic activity and no less than two quasars captured in some sort of complex mutual orbit, the result of which is a stasis zone, enclosed by the pull of the different gravitational and magnetic fields.” 

The crew aim to investigate what alien and unknown vessels they can while clearing a path. Unfortunately, the USS da Vinci, begins to experience technical problems, and soon realise the laws of probability are out of order. As a result, the challenge proves far harder than expected - with devastating consequences. There are hints that the eventually-identified culprit, a long-dormant ship with an improbability drive, may even have been the first derelict and gathered the unusual combination of astrophysical objects [4] around itself, starting the Sargasso Sector in the first place.

Sargassos of Space

As can be seen, these space sargassos span a wide range of properties, times and locations. However they do all share a number of common features.

The first key feature of a space sargasso is some kind of force that causes derelict ships to gather first in the same region and then, in the closest analogies, together as a single mass. In Earth’s Sargasso Sea, the first gathering occurs because of the ocean gyre that causes debris to become becalmed when it escapes the circulating currents. The accretion of derelicts into floating rafts follows as, when close enough, each object shields others from surface waves which might push them apart, but not from waves that might push them together.

In the space sargasso case, the equivalent to a becalmed region is often described as a “gravitational dead spot” (or occasionally as such a spot in some theorized higher dimensional field such as hyperspace or a pocket universe, about which we can’t really say anything meaningful here). The closest we know of to such a place within the Solar System would be a Lagrange Point - one of a number of special locations where gravitational forces from two bodies balance one another. Indeed, the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange Point is now widely used for positioning space observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, in Earth’s shadow, while the L1 point is used for observations of the Sun itself. The L4 and L5 points of the Earth-Moon orbit have been proposed as locations for space colonies such as O’Neill Cylinders. More distant from us, the Sun-Jupiter L4 and L5 points are gathering spots for asteroids, known collectively as Trojans. However in a multi-body system such as our Solar System, none of these gravitational balance points are stable over particularly long time periods. The giant Jupiter and the other planets exert tugs on anything in the Earth-Sun or Earth-Moon Lagrange points. While these are small, they accumulate over many orbits into a disrupting influence. The wind from the Sun itself adds another force to this picture, again unbalancing the scales. At the more distant Sun-Jupiter Lagrange points, the influence of the other planets (and the solar wind) are relatively weaker and so the orbits remain stable for longer - but Trojan asteroids will still escape and new ones will be captured over long time periods.

Outside of a Solar System the gravitational fields are much weaker overall. Objects will move under the influence of the Milky Way’s gravitational potential but such movements will be over much larger timescales and distances, and any motion relative to other stars would be very slight indeed.

There is also an equivalent to the wave pressure causing aggregation. Any two objects (including derelict ships) attract one another under gravity. If left for long enough, and in the absence of other external forces (including stellar heating, interstellar medium, outgassing from the ships or even the radiation pressure of light reflected from their surface) overcoming this very weak attraction, it would indeed cause derelicts to come together as one.

Unfortunately, while these principles do provide some underlying justification for the concept of a space sargasso, the timescales and distance scales involved are vast and the forces involved tiny. Certainly we know of nothing that would cause accumulations on the scale of Hamilton’s Sargasso of Space or the magnetic attraction of Kummer’s Magnetic Spot (except possibly neutron stars, but that’s a different story). Space sargassos nonetheless provide a useful site for thought experiments regarding gravity and the exotic physics that so fascinates many readers of science fiction.

Where the best of our physics understanding can provide no real support is in narratives of ships gathered under alien or psychic influences. As mentioned above, these appear mostly to arise in this context through a confluence of real-world travellers’ tales about the Sargasso Sea with ancient myths of sirens and mermaids. Another thread (equally unsusceptible to scientific explanations at present) is added by analogies to the mysterious disappearances reported in the Bermuda Triangle. Where these are naturally connected is in the role of both these narrative traditions as cautionary tales. They simultaneously acknowledge the human instinct to explore and venture into the unknown, and warn about the necessity of preparation against the contingencies of the unknown, and the hazards that such exploration may expose us to. Such warnings are as necessary in space exploration as they were for early navigators.

However the flip side of such interpretation provides another common theme in space sargasso narratives. These settings provide a showcase of human ingenuity, resourcefulness, courage and problem-solving skills. In a large number of the narratives discussed here, the crews of affected ships escape or survive by searching the sargasso for resources that can replace those they are missing, or which can be used for a new and creative purpose. Alternatively, the precious resource hunted for in the space sargasso is knowledge: an understanding of how they became trapped and the principles necessary to break free. This knowledge is often scientific - relating to probability (as in Star Trek:SCE’s Sargasso Sector), magnetism (as in Sargasso of the Stars), gravity (in examples such as The Graveyard of Space) or other (less recognisable) principles (as in Star Trek’s Elysia). Such narratives encourage the concept that with sufficient scientific knowledge and determination, any problem is amenable to a solution. While many characters (particularly young men of the pulp era) also get to show off their muscles and impress people, the solution to sargasso problems is most often intellectual rather than physical.

Given this, perhaps it’s unsurprising that space sargassos also serve an important conceptual role in science fiction narratives. Some authors make the parallel between the physical and the psychological explicit, as in the case of Milton Lesser in The Graveyard of Space, which ends with the line: “Minutes later they had left the sargasso—both sargassos—behind them”. More often, the role of the sargasso both as a site of stagnation and decay and as a possible source of the resources that lead to salvation, is left largely unspoken [5]. This is the case in Blish’s jungle in the Sargasso of Lost Cities (where New York finds a new purpose), in Bester’s Sargasso Asteroid (where Gully Foyle’s life is redirected), Dan Dare’s sargasso of space (where the fightback against the Mekon really begins) and in Anderson’s Sargasso of Lost Starships (where the protagonist breaks free of his past).

The mysteries of Earth’s Sargasso Sea attracted story tellers for centuries. Modern storytellers have taken that fascination into the centuries to come. While the physical plausibility of the tales varies, these stories are fundamentally stories about resourcefulness and the value of knowledge. They are both shaped by and celebrate the relationship between science and science fiction.