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"In science fiction one can say a great many things that are unpalatable, … because it's expressed as science fiction you can slip it past their defenses."
- Frederik Pohl

Electrono-Mirror  
  Focuses the sun's rays on a planetary surface for terraforming purposes.  

Uranus boasted its tiny colonies; Neptune was now being studied for a colonization project. And far Pluto was under constant electrono-mirror bombardment that its icy surface might some day be cleared.
Technovelgy from The Day We Celebrate, by Nelson S. Bond.
Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1941
Additional resources -

Compare to the synchrophased power beams from Murray Leinster's The Propagandist (1947), the spot light of heat from Niven/Pournelle/Flynn's Fallen Angels (1991) and Clifford Simak's solar energy beam from Masquerade (1941).

For those keeping track, this story was in the January, 1941 issue of Astounding, while Theodore Sturgeon's orbiting mirror was in the February issue, in a clever short story called Completely Automatic.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Day We Celebrate
  More Ideas and Technology by Nelson S. Bond
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  Tech news articles related to works by Nelson S. Bond

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