Dyson spheres in popular culture

rdf:langString Dyson spheres in popular culture

rdf:langString Dyson spheres are theoretical constructs that harvest the entire energy output of a given star by completely enclosing it. They are named after physicist Freeman Dyson, who proposed the concept in 1960. A precursor to the concept of Dyson spheres was featured in the 1937 novel Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. Fictional Dyson spheres are typically solid structures forming a continuous shell around the star in question, although Dyson himself considered that prospect mechanically implausible and instead proposed multiple separate objects independently orbiting the star. It is a type of Big Dumb Object. Dyson spheres are often a background element in fiction, such as in the 1964 novel The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber where aliens enclose multiple stars in this way. Dyson spheres are depicted in the 1975–1983 book series Saga of Cuckoo by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson, and one functions as the setting of Bob Shaw's 1975 novel Orbitsville and its sequels. Variations on the concept include the single circular band of a Dyson sphere without the rest of the sphere in Larry Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld, the halved Dyson sphere in the 2012 novel by Gregory Benford and Niven, and nested Dyson spheres—also known as a Matrioshka brain—as in Colin Kapp's 1980s Cageworld series and Brian Stableford's 1979–1990 .