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"To get anywhere, or even live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer."
- Robert Heinlein
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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.
A variation on "prison planet" is the phrase "space prison". The first use of the phrase "space prison" was probably in "Crossroads of Space" by Arthur Stangland in 1932.
However, Tom Godwin was probably the first to use it to describe a real place, as opposed to using it as a metaphor, in his novel Space Prison, published in 1960.
"Thoroughbreds of Earth they were, incarcerating themselves in this space prison, making it possible for ships to make the two billion-mile trip without using too much valuable space for fuel."
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'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
