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"Evolutionary success ... is going to absolutely require mobility on, at a minimum, an interplanetary scale. We either go or we die out."
- Richard Morgan
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| Manmade Black Hole | ||
| Using the power of a hole in the continuum. |
Jack Williamson doesn't actually use the phrase "black hole", but he does use all the words, as well as the concept. As far as I know, this is a first in science fiction (or anywhere else).
| Chan Derron’s brain was staggered by that machine’s immensity, and baffled by its strangeness. Against the star-shot dark of space hung two great spheres of blacker blackness. Three colossal rings, set all at right angles, bound each of them; and between them, connecting them, was a smaller cylinder of the same dully gleaming metal.
“It looks a little bit like a twenty-million ton peanut,” he muttered. “But I never saw anything so black as those great globes!” “They are not anything,” said Stella Eleroid. “They are simply holes in the continuum of our universe. That blackness is the darkness of a lightless hyperspace. “It is through those holes that the geodesies are refracted,” she said. “They are held open by the achronic field coils in the rings about them. There are four rings about each globe of force—the three that you see, and a fourth that has been rotated into hyper-space. |
| From One Against The Legion,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Astounding in 1939 Additional resources -
|
This is a part of the description of the geofractor, a teleportation device from this same story.
A firm mathematical model of a gravitationally collapsed object came about in the early 1920's through work by Einstein and Schwarzschild. A 1926 book by Arthur Eddington described how even light would be unable to escape from such an object.
Apparently, the phrase "black hole" seems to derive from the Black Hole of Calcutta (a famous prison), which Europeans encountered in the mid-1700's. The idea of a "dark star" was proposed in 1783 by an English country parson, John Michell. He wrote a letter to Henry Cavendish dated November 27, 1783, saying that such “dark stars” would be observable only by the impact they had on bodies revolving around them.
The modern use seems to derive from a shouted response from the audience during a lecture by John Wheeler, who wished for a more compact term than "gravitationally collapsed object".
Compare to the asymptotic drive from Imperial Earth (1976) by Arthur C. Clarke.
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'... the two pairs of waldoes in the screen followed in exact, simultaneous parallelism.'
'THE SPACE VESSEL was traveling swiftly… For over five thousand years they had Voyaged on and on.’
'They circled the vast audiences, dancing, twittering, chirping...'
'The sun-quilt was a patchwork of colors and materials on the inward side, but silvered on the outward side...'
'Jim, I saw them reduce four of my doctors and nurses into those little cubes!'
'Fats Jordan was hanging in the center of the Big Glass Balloon, hugging his guitar to his massive black belly above his purple shorts..'
'When confronted by hills, or rough terrain, it did not stop, but simply slowed until the task demanded equaled its steady power output.'
'... the brain is no longer subjected to the accustomed pull, and it expands slightly in all directions.'
