Asteroids in Fiction - Early Examples

Early Examples

The earliest explicit references to asteroids date from the late nineteenth century:

• Hector Servadac, Voyages et ADVENTURES à travers le Monde Solaire (Off on a Comet, 1877), novel by Jules Verne. A Victorian vision of touring the solar system via handy "comet Gallia", the comet captures the "recently discovered asteroid Nerina" as it traverses the asteroid belt. Nerina was fictional at the time, but 1318 Nerina would be discovered and named by Cyril V. Jackson nearly sixty years later.
• Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898), serial by Garrett P. Serviss. A fleet of spaceships from Earth on its way to attack Mars halts at an asteroid that is being mined for gold by the Martians.
• La Chasse au météore ("Hunt for the Meteor", or "Chase of the Golden Meteor", 1908), by Jules and Michel Verne. This posthumously published Jules Verne novel was extensively edited and modified by his son Michel. The attribution of plot elements between father and son was long debated, until Verne's original version was unearthed. The book begins with the rivalry between two amateur astronomers who both claim discovery of a new asteroid. Originally an in-crowd issue among astronomers, it becomes a major worldwide problem when it is found that the asteroid is about to fall on Earth (to be exact, in Greenland). One of The Adventures of Tintin has a similar premise: The Shooting Star. Unlike later asteroid books, the main problem is not the damage which its fall may cause, but the fact that it is made of solid gold, which could upset the economy of the world. Thus, the asteroid's eventual fall into the Atlantic and its disappearance beneath the waves is presented as a satisfactory aversion of the economic danger, and there are none of the huge and highly destructive tsunami which in later stories (and in reality) would have followed. Fred Hoyle's Element 79 (1967) exploits essentially the same plot device: an asteroid with significant amount of gold wreaks havoc with the Earth's economy.
• The Valley of Fear (1914), short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes's arch-enemy, "is the celebrated author of 'The Dynamics of an Asteroid', a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it" Though the Holmes stories were published at the same time as those by H. G. Wells, Holmes regards astronomical studies as an issue of pure abstract science, which would never have practical applications or provide the scene of future adventures.
• "Asterite Invaders" (1932–33), a storyline in the Buck Rogers comic strip, featuring miniature humanoids living on the asteroids.
• Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince, 1943), novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The title character lives on an asteroid named "B-612". He then travels among various asteroids, each inhabited by a single person: a lamp-lighter, a king, a businessman, a geographer . . . . Saint-Exupéry made no effort at scientific accuracy, since he was mainly writing social and political commentary and satire. (For example, his reference to "Baobab trees which, if not uprooted in time, might take root and break an asteroid to pieces" is commonly understood as an allegory of Fascism). The asteroid moon Petit-Prince was named after the character, and 46610 Bésixdouze after his asteroid.