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"Does it open a new horizon for my thinking? Does it lead me to think new kinds of thoughts, that I would not otherwise perhaps have thought at all? These qualities are what [make] science fiction ...unique."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Gravity Well | ||
| If you visualize spacetime as a flat, elastic plane, a planet will deform it, and it sits at the bottom of its own hole. |
| He was the pilot and engineer, the only other Terrestrial on Mercury. When you dove this far down into the sun's monstrous gravitational well, you couldn't take a big crew along. |
| Technovelgy from Life Cycle,
by Poul Anderson. Published by Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1957 Additional resources -
|
This expression quickly became a favorite of veteran sf writers; Heinlein, Clarke and Niven used it within a few years. Here's Niven using it as the subject of a short story, At the Bottom of a Hole (1966):
"The hole." Garner knew enough Belters to have learned a little of their
slang.
"The very one. His first instinct must have been to change course.
Belters learn to avoid gravity wells. A man can get killed half a dozen
ways coming too close to a hole. A good autopilot will get him safely
around it, or program an in-and-out spin, or even land him at the bottom,
God forbid. But miners don't carry good autopilots. They carry cheap
autopilots, and they stay clear of holes."
More recently, Charles Stross uses it in Accelerando (2005):
"He must have been on course for Luna when we found him. Ceres was behind
him with the radar. Our ships were ahead of him, matching course at two
gee. His mining ship wouldn't throw more than point five gee, so
eventually they'd pull alongside him no matter what he did. Then he
noticed Mars was just ahead of him."
“Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there.”
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| Reflect Orbital Sunlight On Demand |
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'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...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...'
