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"Retire? Yeah, I want to die with my head in the typewriter. That's my idea of retirement."
- Alfred Bester
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| 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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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
