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"There's a poetry in the materials we use to construct our world of artifacts; it speaks of our long history as a technological species."
- William Gibson
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| Prison Planet | ||
| A planet (or planetoid) that serves as a jail for solar system offenders. |
As far as I know, the first use of the phrase "prison planet".
| Gray was charged with having stolen the real coil and substituted a blank for it. He knew better; soon realized that the whole affair was a conspiracy between the terrestrials and their Venusian underlings to defraud the stockholders, but upon Gray alone rested the blame. He was convicted and sentenced to five years on the prison planet, Ganymede. Upon his release he became a tramp, wandering from planet to planet, until at last he became one of the Controllers of Gernser. |
| Technovelgy from The Venus Germ,
by R.F. Starzl (w/F. Pragnell). Published by Wonder Stories in 1932 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the earliest use of the idea Prison Planet (Penal Settlement) from Revolt on Inferno (1931) by Victor Rousseau. See also the asteroid prison from One Against the Legion (1939) by Jack Williamson, the Alcatraz of Space from Reunion on Ganymede (1938) by Clifford Simak, the Moon as prison from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) by Robert Heinlein, zero-time jail from A World Out of Time (1976) by Larry Niven and Brainlock from Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) by William Gibson.
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'Sapiro’s computer just kept dialing at random, hanging up on humans, until it got a fellow computer of the same type as itself.'
'I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks.'
'... all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'If you surf over a bump, the spokes contract to roll over it.'
'He wrote on it, using the pointed fingernail of his right forefinger...'
'Frank was cursing into his wristpad, switching between Arabic and English.'
