Originally posted by TOC:
Fun story, Marcus. Reminds me of a weird little artle I read once in Sky and Telescope - it was about how you should care for your own pet black hole. The main thing to remember was to keep the thing under control by using very powerful magnets. You should regard the black hole as an extremely slippery thing, and the magnets are the things that are constantly catching it. Remember that if your magnets ever let the little singularity slip past their control just once, Blackie would immediately sink to the center of the Earth, from where it would start eating away at the Earth from within, slowly at first but then faster and faster as it developed more and more of an appetite the more it ate... until the entire Earth and everything on it finally disappeared into the now Earth-mass black hole! I hope this Xander guy has some really powerful magnets at his disposal!
The black hole story is a crossover with a Dr. Who spinoff called "The Sarah-Jane Adventures" which will be airing some time later this year - they showed a pilot episode on New Year's Day. There are minor spoilers in it, for that and for Dr. Who Season 2, but nothing too serious:
Good Dog - it helps if you're familiar with Buffy and Dr. Who.
Larry Niven wrote a story on the lines you describe - someone messes around with a time machine and accidentally drops a mini black hole into the moon millions of years ago, with fairly nasty results. Can't remember the title. But I think since then someone has proved that small black holes aren't stable, even at the centre of a planet they release matter and energy faster than they can absorb it, and eventually evaporate.
