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:
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)