On Literature: On Asteroids, Comets & Meteors (From Fiction to Science Fiction)

"Above them Phileas Fogg moved in majestic indifference. He was following his own rational orbit around the world, without bothering at all about the asteroids gravitating around him." (Jules Verne, "Around the World in Eighty Days", 1873),

"Nothing can be prettier than to see the movement, in perfectly harmonic relations, of planets round their centres, of satellites around planets, of suns, with their planets and satellites, around their centres, and of these in turn around theirs. And to persons who have loved earth as much as I do, and who, while at school there, have studied other worlds and stars, then distant, as carefully as I have, nothing, as I say, can be more charming than to see at once all this play and interplay; to see comets passing from system to system, warming themselves now at one white sun, and then at a party-colored double; to see the people on them changing customs and costumes as they change their light, and to hear their quaint discussions as they justify the new and ridicule the old." (Edward E Hale, "Hands Off", 1881)

"There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus." (Howard P Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", 1928)

"They are so confident that they will run on forever. But they won’t run on. They don’t know that this is all one huge big blazing meteor that makes a pretty fire in space, but that some day it’ll have to hit." (Ray Bradbury, "Fahrenheit 451", 1953)

"Earth - it was a place where you could stop being afraid, a place where fear of suffocation was not, where fear of blowout was not, where nobody went berserk with the chokers or dreamed of poisoned air or worried about shorthorn cancer or burn blindness or meteorite dust or low-gravity muscular atrophy. A place where there was wind to blow your sweat away." (Walter M Miller Jr, "The Lineman", 1957)

"There were still some meteorites coming in, making bright little winks of fire where they bit into the plain. Deadly stingers out of nowhere, heading nowhere, impartially orbiting, random as rain, random as death. The debris of creation." (Walter M Miller Jr, "The Lineman", 1957)

"Whole worlds formed in a pregnant void: not spherical worlds merely, but dodeka-spherical, and those much more intricate than that. Not merely seven colors to play with, but seven to the seventh and to the seventh again. Stars vivid in the bright light. You who have seen stars only in darkness. be silent! Asteroids that they ate like peanuts, for now they were all metamorphic giants. Galaxies like herds of rampaging elephants. Bridges so long that both ends of them receded over the light-speed edges. Waterfalls, of a finer water, that bounced off galaxy clusters as if they were boulders." (Raphael A Lafferty, "Sky", 1971)

"Somewhere a star was going nova, a black hole was vacuuming space, a comet was combing its hair." (Kate Wilhelm, "Mrs. Bagley Goes to Mars", 1978)

"Storms of Cataclysm lashed the Cretaceous earth, vast fires raged, and cometary grit sifted through the roiling atmosphere, to blight and kill the wilting foliage, till the mighty Dinosauria, adapted to a world now shattered, fell in massed extinction, and the leaping machineries of Evolution were loosed in chaos, to re-populate the stricken Earth with strange new orders of being." (William Gibson & Bruce Sterling, "The Difference Engine", 1991)

"Terraforming is an ancient profession. Making your world more habitable began on the Earth itself, with thefirst dancing fire that warmed its builder’s cave; and everything since - everygreen world and asteroid and comet - is an enlargement on that first cozy cave." (Robert Reed, "A Place with Shade", 1995)