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"As the rate of technological development speeds up, the gap between science fiction and what we’re living now is getting narrower all the time."
- Richard Morgan
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| Artificial Sun | ||
| Use of a single large artifact to provide sunlight to a city or a world. |
This is the earliest use of the phrase "artificial sun" that I know about, but it is recreated in different forms in different stories.
In this tale, there is not only an artifical sun, but an entire sky!
| Buell was impressed, but it was not until he had been taken out under the artificial sun and sky and had learned its history that he began to have some realization of the power and resources of the man against whom he had pitted his relatively puny strength.
“At night,” said Odd, “the moon, stars and planets will come out and move across the sky, just as they do in the upper world... "But why this elaborate duplication of the terrestrial heavens?” inquired Buell. "Our priests are both astronomers and astrologers. They could not properly conduct their holy offices without making their daily and nightly observations. |
| Technovelgy from The Bride of Osirus,
by Otis Adelbert Kline. Published by Weird Tales in 1927 Additional resources -
|
Also used in the Rotating Hollow Planetoid Habitat from Electronic Siege by John W. Campbell, published by Wonder Stories in 1932.
Compare to the reflected artificial sun from Revolt on Inferno (1931) by Victor Rousseau, the orbital mirror from Completely Automatic (1941) by Theodore Sturgeon, the Fusion Sunlight Tube from At the Bottom of a Hole (1966) by Larry Niven and the Lado-Acheson system from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson.
"...When the colony was established, the whole interior was carved out with atomic burners — burned the stuff out into gas, and let it escape. The shell’s about half a mile thick. Inside, the centrifugal force gives an acceleration just equal to one earth gravity, we’re up to speed, and you can see we have about an earth-weight away from it now. And an artificial sun gives plenty of light.”
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'So, Ender, we will now begin your education.'
'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'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...'
