# Stealing planets **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 21, 2024, 5:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149 "2024-06-21T05:45:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Plutonium\_Chef](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/plutonium_chef/32/11211_2.png) [@Plutonium\_Chef](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Plutonium_Chef)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2024, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149/21 "2024-06-21T15:01:37Z")
Don’t forget Niven’s _A World out of Time_. Maybe not _stealing_, but the humans of Earth turn Uranus into a gravitational tug, to move Earth away from the expanding Sun.They decided to put it in orbit around Jupiter, because reasons; in the process they drop Ganymede into Jupiter, which causes Bad Things to Happen. Back in the 1970s the cover of the paperback spoilered it all… ---
**Author:** ![Whack-a-Mole](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whack-a-mole/32/141_2.png) [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2024, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149/22 "2024-06-21T15:06:26Z")
Sounds a lot like The Wandering Earth I mentioned above. Not exactly the same but certainly some similarities. Maybe changed enough to avoid copyright (although it is Chinese and I doubt they give a shit about US copyright). ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2024, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149/23 "2024-06-21T19:06:02Z")
[The Sins of The Fathers](https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-sins-of-the-fathers_stanley-schmidt/2581882/#edition=3708931) by Stanley Schmidt which ran in Analog before he became editor. I read it when it was serialized back 50 years ago, but it involved aliens helping to move the earth out of harm’s way. There is a sequel. ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2024, 5:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149/24 "2024-06-22T05:36:14Z")
[Have Space Suit - Will Travel.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_Space_Suit%E2%80%94Will_Travel) The Wormface home world is sentenced to be rotated out of normal space. ---
**Author:** ![iamatractorboy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iamatractorboy/32/21261_2.png) [@iamatractorboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamatractorboy)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2024, 6:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149/25 "2024-06-22T06:44:18Z")
In the novelisations of the BBC sci-fi comedy series _Red Dwarf_, Earth is blasted out of the solar system, if memory serves by a series of nuclear explosions. One of the characters, Lister, also plays pool at an interplanetary scale! ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2024, 12:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149/26 "2024-06-22T12:10:37Z")
Psst, post 12. ---
**Author:** ![Galactus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/galactus/32/3581_2.png) [@Galactus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Galactus)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2024, 2:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149/27 "2024-06-22T14:20:42Z")
I’ve moved a few planets. Those aren’t asteroids. ---
**Author:** ![Reno\_Nevada\_Jr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ecc23a/32.png) [@Reno\_Nevada\_Jr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reno_Nevada_Jr)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2024, 1:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149/28 "2024-06-24T01:42:18Z")
**Earth** : It isn’t stolen, and at the end of the story it is only on the way out of the Solar System, but _With Friends Like These_ by Allen Dean Foster in the collection by the same name has aliens approach Earthlings with a proposal for an alliance against a threatening alien race. The Earthlings agree to join the war and use the Earth as a space ship. They bring along the Moon because they had gotten used to it. The last line is something like “What will we do when there are no more X?” ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2024, 5:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149/29 "2024-06-24T05:30:14Z")
Thanks to everyone who contributed. I’ve compiled a list of all the works that qualify. Not every story discussed does, since some of them don’t involve the Solar System body actually leaving the Solar System. (Note: going to an alternate Solar System doesn’t count as leaving.) I don’t think the “Stolen” in the subject line inhibited any contributions, which is good, because I didn’t mean to limit them to planets necessarily being stolen. Any case of a planet or other SS body being moved out of the Solar System counts. OK, so here’s the list so far: **Sun:** _Galaxias_ by Stephen Baxter **Earth:** “The Stolen Earth” _Doctor Who_ **Earth:** _Xeelee: Vengeance_ by Stephen Baxter **Earth:** _Hyperion Cantos_ by Dan Simmons **Earth:** _Sins of the Fathers_ by Stanley Schmidt **Earth** and **Moon** : _Wtih Friends Like These…_ by Alan Dean Foster **Moon:** _Space: 1999_ (tv show) **Mars:** _Moving Mars_ by Greg Bear. **Deimos:** _Marathon Trilogy_ (video games) publisher: Bungie **Jupiter:** _The Jupiter Theft_ by Donald Moffitt **Janus:** _Pushing Ice_ by Alastair Reynolds **Neptune** and **Triton:** _Macroscope_ by Piers Anthony I have not read all the above works. For those I haven’t read, I based whether to include or not on descriptions found online. I couldn’t find descriptions for all of them, so I trusted people posting in this thread. Anyway, it’d be nice to find one story for each of the planets, but I’m not optimistic all of them can be found. But let’s see if we can find any for Mercury, Venus, Saturn and Uranus. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2024, 11:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149/30 "2024-06-24T11:30:58Z")
> [@dtilque](#): > > OK, so here’s the list so far: > > **Sun:** _Galaxias_ by Stephen Baxter > **Earth:** “The Stolen Earth” _Doctor Who_ > **Earth:** _Xeelee: Vengeance_ by Stephen Baxter > **Earth:** _Hyperion Cantos_ by Dan Simmons > **Earth:** _Sins of the Fathers_ by Stanley Schmidt > **Earth** and **Moon** : _Wtih Friends Like These…_ by Alan Dean Foster > **Moon:** _Space: 1999_ (tv show) Hey! You forgot what I said about Gru stealing the moon in the first _Despicable Me_ movie!\*\* ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2024, 11:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149/31 "2024-06-24T11:50:00Z")
> [@dtilque](#): > > (Note: going to an alternate Solar System doesn’t count as leaving.) That was a rule? ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2024, 6:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149/32 "2024-06-24T18:22:41Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Hey! You forgot what I said about Gru stealing the moon in the first _Despicable Me_ movie!\*\* I haven’t seen that movie, but from the plot summary on Wikipedia, Gru doesn’t take the Moon out of the Solar System. > [@Mangetout](#): > > > [@dtilque](#): > > > > (Note: going to an alternate Solar System doesn’t count as leaving.) > > That was a rule? It was a situation I hadn’t considered when writing the OP, but someone suggested Greg Bear’s _Eon_, where that happened. Well, actually, it was probably a time-travelled _and_ alternate universe asteroid in that story. At any rate, I had to make a decision on this situation and that’s it. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2024, 7:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149/33 "2024-06-24T19:17:13Z")
OK. Your thread, your rules. There’s a bit of a difference, IMO, between: - Aliens stealing a body from our solar system and moving it to a different place in the universe that appears to be their own solar system, near a different star. vs - An object in our solar system being moved to a timeline-duplicate of our existing solar system, and/or travelling in time, but staying in our own same solar system. But as I say, your thread, your goalposts. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2024, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149/34 "2024-06-24T19:29:54Z")
> [@Reno\_Nevada\_Jr](#): > > **Earth** : It isn’t stolen, and at the end of the story it is only on the way out of the Solar System, but _With Friends Like These_ by Allen Dean Foster in the collection by the same name has aliens approach Earthlings with a proposal for an alliance against a threatening alien race. The Earthlings agree to join the war and use the Earth as a space ship. They bring along the Moon because they had gotten used to it. I came here to post that and I liked the story. ---
**Author:** ![SunUp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ea5d25/32.png) [@SunUp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SunUp)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2024, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149/35 "2024-06-24T21:20:26Z")
Ooh, I just thought of - possibly - another, Charlie Stross’s _Missile Gap_. Just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Earth is “flattened” and becomes part of the surface of an Alderson Disk in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. May not match the OP because it is not known how it happened - and the idea is advanced in the book that it may be happening in a machine simulation. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stealing-planets/1003149.md?page=1)