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"the [science fiction] writer should be able to convince the reader (and himself) that the wonders he is describing really can come true...and that gets tricky when you take a good, hard look at the world around you."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Prison Planet (Penal Settlement) | ||
| A prison so far from Earth. |
Probably the earliest reference to the idea of a prison planet.
| "...for the conspirators there remained nothing but hopeless exile on Inferno, the Doom Planet. It was well called Inferno, for no earthly penal settlement could have exceeded it in horrors. The outermost member of the solar system, lying far beyond Pluto, it traversed so immense an orbit that it was believed to complete it only after a period of thirty thousand years... This was the destination of the prisoners, because exile to Inferno was an hundredfold worse than death, The very name conveyed unspeakable horror. |
| Technovelgy from Revolt on Inferno,
by Victor Rousseau. Published by Miracle Science and Fantasy Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Compare to 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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'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
