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"All fiction is propaganda, and the fiction we like is the propaganda we believe in, and the fiction we don't like is the propaganda we don't believe in."
- Samuel R. Delany

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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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from A Brand New World
  More Ideas and Technology by Ray Cummings
  Tech news articles related to A Brand New World
  Tech news articles related to works by Ray Cummings

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