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…
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).
The Sins of The Fathers 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.
Have Space Suit - Will Travel.
The Wormface home world is sentenced to be rotated out of normal space.
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!
Psst, post 12.
I’ve moved a few planets. Those aren’t asteroids.
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?”
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.
Hey! You forgot what I said about Gru stealing the moon in the first Despicable Me movie!**
That was a rule?
I haven’t seen that movie, but from the plot summary on Wikipedia, Gru doesn’t take the Moon out of the Solar System.
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.
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.
I came here to post that and I liked the story.
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.