Or maybe just borrowing them. I’m looking for SF stories where a Solar System planet or other body has been moved to somewhere outside the Solar System. I’ve thought of several, but I’m sure there are more. Here’s my list so far:
Earth: I can only think of one, but I can’t remember its name or the author (and it wasn’t very well written). I’m sure there are others that people can come up with, so I’m not going to pursue this unless no one else has an example. Moon:Space: 1999, of course. Mars:Moving Mars by Greg Bear. Jupiter:The Jupiter Theft by Donald Moffitt Neptune: Macroscope by Piers Anthony. IIRC, they take Triton along with them, but it’s been so long since I read the book, I could be wrong.
Rules: It has to be an artifical movement of the planet or other body caused by human or alien tech. Something like a Dark Star™ coming in and stealing the planet (e.g. “A Pail of Air” by Fritz Leiber) does not count.
If it’s an asteroid or comet that’s been moved, it has to be a named one. A generic asteroid turned into a spaceship does not count.
There’s a short story by John Varley (I think) in which a comet is hollowed out and turned into a luxury space liner. I don’t know if this qualifies under the OP’s rules, because it’s not taken elsewhere in the sense implied by “stolen,” it just flies around its own system. But it’s definitely artificially propelled and can move about on its own. (I can’t remember the title and google is defeating me.)
Thought of a better example. In Bungie’s landmark video game Marathon, the title colony ship was constructed out of one of the moons of Mars. Yeah, they’re tiny, but they’re still moons.
The first one I thought of was Macroscope, but that was mentioned in the OP. And I can’t let any thread mention that book without a warning: Do not read it. It’s that bad. The only good thing I can say about it is that it’s not Mercycle or Race Against Time. Yeah, it took me too long as a teenager to realize just how horrible Piers Anthony is.
In Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, the galactic civilization’s ultimate punishment for a misbehaving alien race is to rotate their homeworld into other dimensions. They don’t take their star with them. This isn’t actually done to any planet in our system, though.
In Greg Bear’s The Forge of God, aliens completely deconstruct Jupiter’s moon Europa to use it as raw materials. I can’t remember which alien race did it, though, which means I’m not sure if its ultimate fate involved leaving the system or not.
In Dan Simmons’ Hyperian Cantos,it turns out that Earth, which everyone thought had been destroyed, had actually been transported to the Large Magellanic Cloud by hidden, godlike aliens. They eventually put it back.
Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship, by George Dyson is non-fiction, so it doesn’t conform to the OP, but it does discuss moving large objects, including planets via nuclear explosions/propulsion, so it may be of interest to the OP.
Yes, This was the example I was going to mention. In The Expanse, Eros is a Belter colony that gets hijacked by Alien Super Science, and it threatens to collide with Earth until the heroes manage to divert it to Venus.
Doesn’t Niven somewhere describe how a Ringworld can be made mobile? Triggering solar activity on one side of the star to tug the entire solar system or something. Can’t remember if that was in one of the Ringworld books or in some short essay.
He also had the Puppeteer’s Fleet of Worlds, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: A fleet of planets moved by giant engines. Not technically “stolen” since the Puppeteers owned them to begin with, but still pretty cool.