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"I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 |
| Manufactured Planet | ||
| Is that a moon - or a space station? |
| Our first vague impression was corroborated; the object was a vast sphere of perhaps a thousand feet in diameter and of a dark, greenish metal. It was encircled by criss-crossing and massive bands of the same material. There were no other distinguishing features...
...what was our astonishment to find ourselves close to and moving steadily toward the green sphere, and a great door in its side yawning to receive us! |
| Technovelgy from The Heritage of the Earth,
by Harley S. Aldinger. Published by Amazing Stories in 1932 Additional resources -
|
This iconic picture should be familiar, at least in outline:
(We were pulled inside!)
The reader might be reminded of the Death Star pulling in the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars.
The author does not describe the means by which the craft is drawing others in side, saying only "we were drawn forward by a force not our own..."
The smaller sphere is the earthman's ship described thusly:
I had an interplanetary flier constructed on that principle. A great steel sphere nearly twenty feet in diameter, made of two thick steel shells with a thinner one between of copper of the necessary purity. The flier was fitted out inside for human travel, and supplied and provisioned much as an airplane in which flight to the polar regions is contemplated would be...At the edge of this floated, immobile, the heavy steel flier, like a boat at a wharf! It was an immense sphere; its smooth, highly polished, steel hide was unbroken by any projections or rivets. No doors or windows were to be seen. There were no windows, I learned, and the rounded, massive door had been carefully fashioned to fit without a crevice. The Space Wanderer resembled nothing so much to me as a gigantic specimen of the steel balls used in automobile ball-bearings.
Elsewhere in the story, the alien sphere is described as "the little manufactured planet, swinging through space, bearing its precious burden, the Heritage of Earth."
Compare to the battle sphere from The Space Rover (1932) by Edwin K. Sloat and the Transparent Spherical Ship from Schachner and Zagat's 1931 novel The Emperor of the Stars.
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