In Fiction
The first publication of the concept may be Newton's cannonball in the 1728 book A Treatise of the System of the World, although it was primarily used as a thought experiment regarding gravity.
Perhaps the most famous representation of a space gun is in Jules Verne's novel, From the Earth to the Moon (made into a silent movie called Le Voyage dans la Lune), in which astronauts fly to the moon aboard a ship launched from a cannon. Another famous example is the hydrogen accelerator cannon used by the Martians to launch their invasion in H. G. Wells' book The War of the Worlds. Wells also used the concept in the climax of the 1936 movie Things to Come. The device was featured in films as late as 1967, such as Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon.
In the video game Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams, Percival Lowell builds a space gun to send a ship to Mars.
In the Nintendo game Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door the protagonist is fired to the moon from a large cannon powered by the explosion of thousands of anthropomorphic bombs. This is depicted in a somewhat comical fashion.
Gerald Bull's assassination and the Project Babylon gun were also the starting point for Frederick Forsyth's 1994 novel The Fist of God.
Read more about this topic: Space Gun
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)