Thrilling Tales of Astrophysics

Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll is pining for the good old days:

I’m going through one of my “I would kill for some new SF” phases, SF in this case being defined in a narrow and idiosyncratic way. In particular, I want the modern version of those old SF stories where SF writers, having just read some startling New Fact [Black holes could be very small! Mercury isn’t tide-locked! The Galilean moons are far more interesting than we thought!], would craft some thrilling tale intended to highlight whatever it was that the author had just learned.

I suspect this is mostly due to James’s very… particular tastes in science fiction. But clearly, the solution here is to set up a new online magazine specializing in just this sort of thing– James Nicoll’s Thrilling Tales of Astrophysics, or some such. That’ll get him all the stories he could ever want to read, and then some…

Of course, another issue, as noted in the comments, is that many of the recent discoveries in astrophysics aren’t what you’d call plot-friendly, or, as one commenter put it: “tidally-locked super-Jovians with endless star-driven storms in their atmospheres of boiling rock are impressive scenery but you can’t really use them as setting.” But isn’t this just a failure of imagination?

So, here’s a Plot Suggestion Open Thread: Pick some recent discovery in astrophysics, and suggest a way to use it in an interesting SF story. You don’t have to write the story (particularly not in my comments, Jonathan Vos Post), just the elevator pitch. There’s got to be something interesting that could be done with an endless star-driven storm in an atmosphere of boiling rock– what is it?