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"I was involved in a cloning project. .. to send me into outer space along with a lot of other people. Not the whole me - just a hair from my head, while I still had some. I would thus pop up in another galaxy in the distant future."
- Arthur C. Clarke
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| Artificial Sun | ||
| Use of a single large artifact to provide sunlight to a city or a world. |
This is the earliest use of the phrase "artificial sun" that I know about, but it is recreated in different forms in different stories.
In this tale, there is not only an artifical sun, but an entire sky!
| Buell was impressed, but it was not until he had been taken out under the artificial sun and sky and had learned its history that he began to have some realization of the power and resources of the man against whom he had pitted his relatively puny strength.
“At night,” said Odd, “the moon, stars and planets will come out and move across the sky, just as they do in the upper world... "But why this elaborate duplication of the terrestrial heavens?” inquired Buell. "Our priests are both astronomers and astrologers. They could not properly conduct their holy offices without making their daily and nightly observations. |
| Technovelgy from The Bride of Osirus,
by Otis Adelbert Kline. Published by Weird Tales in 1927 Additional resources -
|
Also used in the Rotating Hollow Planetoid Habitat from Electronic Siege by John W. Campbell, published by Wonder Stories in 1932.
Compare to the reflected artificial sun from Revolt on Inferno (1931) by Victor Rousseau, the orbital mirror from Completely Automatic (1941) by Theodore Sturgeon, the Fusion Sunlight Tube from At the Bottom of a Hole (1966) by Larry Niven and the Lado-Acheson system from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson.
"...When the colony was established, the whole interior was carved out with atomic burners — burned the stuff out into gas, and let it escape. The shell’s about half a mile thick. Inside, the centrifugal force gives an acceleration just equal to one earth gravity, we’re up to speed, and you can see we have about an earth-weight away from it now. And an artificial sun gives plenty of light.”
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'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
'Then he became aware of a gentle pressure pushing him away from the ship.'
'And now they wre busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on...'
