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"Human beings hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn; when they do, which isn't often, on their own, the hard way."
- Robert Heinlein
 |
| Xenephrene Interstellar World | ||
| A planet not attached to a solar system. |
| By mid-December, at a convention of
astronomers held in London, the new
world was named Xenephrene. Father
went over in one of the mail planes and
read his afterward famous paper, suggesting
the name, and giving his calculation
of the elements of the orbit of this
new heavenly body. It, was the most
startling announcement which had yet
been made, and for one newspaper
edition it got the first page. And I was
ordered to give nine minutes of broadcasting
time to it. "Xenephrene" was a globe not quite, but very nearly as large as the earth. It had come whirling in like a comet from the star-filled regions of outer space; presumably like a comet to encircle our sun and then, with a hyperbolic orbit, to depart from us forever. , It had come visually into our northern heavens, and crossed the earth's orbit on the opposite side of the sun from us. It encircled the sun - this was in December—made its turn between the orbits of Mercury and Venus, and now was supposedly departing. |
| Technovelgy from A Brand New World,
by Ray Cummings. Published by Famous Fantastic Mysteries in 1942 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the first use of the term rogue planet from Satan's World (1967) by Poul Anderson, rogue world from George R.R. Martin's 1977 novel Dying of the Light and wandering worlds from When Worlds Collide (1932) by Edwin Balmer (w/P. Wylie).
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| Capturing Asteroids With Nets |
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'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
