Qual trabalho de ficção científica mostrou pela primeira vez uma arma de destruição em massa em escala galáctica?

1930: "O raio triplo", uma breve história de RV Happel in Amazing Stories Quarterly, Queda 1930, disponível no Internet Archive.

Resumo da plotagem por Everett F. Bleiler in Ficção científica: Os anos Gernsback:

Professor Lucius Raymond is the inventor [of] two rays, the Twin Ray and the Triple Ray. The famed Twin Ray, a combination of ultraviolet and infrared, amounts to a disintegrator. Its source is an adapted Crookes' tube, with an unmentioned radioactive substance. A demonstration of this ray to the Germans leads to their retreat from Paris. (While the author is not clear, this seems to refer to a second world war.) This ray, in addition to being the prize weapon in the American arsenal, has extensive peaceful uses.

The Triple Ray, which destroys atoms, has been discovered almost by accident. On the single occasion that it is used, it drills a hole through a hill. More, it continues on and slices the top off a nearby mountain. Then it leaves the solar system and disrupts several stars. And it continues, moving faster than light. Since the universe is finite and space is curved, the ray will continue on around the universe, spreading, and return to disintegrate Earth. It will eventually devour the whole universe.

Trecho da história:

My curiosity vastly aroused by his letter, I took the first opportunity to see my old friend and learn what discovery had so upset him. Of the truth of his contentions I will say nothing other than that in so far as I was able to follow him in his deductions and experiments every fact seems to bear out his theory. His first discovery at the observatory was that the tremendous energy released from the mountain lodge, while he was attempting to measure the speed of the Triple Ray, had formed into an interstellar ocean of destruction, rushing madly through outer space, engulfing all matter it encountered and converting it into its own destructive nature.

It was, indeed, in the very same lodge only a few days before his death that Lucius, flat on his back from two strokes which left him paralyzed below the waist, slowly and carefully explained to me fully for the first time the exact nature of his discoveries at Dudley. I will give this in his own words, since it is thus that I best remember what he said to me.

[. . . .]

"It is for this reason that I cannot say how far in space the thing has traveled nor where it may be now. But this I do know and have proven many times over. The ray is traveling, not in a straight line after all, but instead in a closed circle, and must by every law of mathematics return again to its beginning. And since I have been able to learn by experiment that it renews and increases itself by that which it destroys, I have no particle of doubt in my mind but that on its return to the earth our planet will be utterly annihilated.

"The circle is vast, I know, for it was months after I first began to trace its course on an astronomical map that I was able to detect the slight deviation of the arc. It must travel the very fringes of the known stellar spaces where it takes light a thousand million years but to cross. Yet so terrific is the ray's speed that it may carry it round and back, I fear, in a lifetime; perhaps less. And no sight of its return will give warning, since it precedes its own light as lightning seems to precede thunder. It is, in short, a natural force which will surely ride the universe until all active matter has come within its circle, as it must sometime, and been destroyed. And even then it will circle on until all time has ceased to be. Perhaps it will finally be the birth itself of a new and different universe. I do not know.

Parece ópera espacial para mim! EE "Doc" Smith Skylark DuQuesne, 1965:

Dorothy’s face began to pale. “By that analogy you mean destroy the whole galaxy! How can such a thing be possible? It can’t possibly be possible!”

He told her how the operation could be performed. That apparatus that the Barlo women had dredged up out of nowhere had a lot of capabilities that did not appear on the surface. Blackie DuQuesne had perceived one set of those possibilities, and he and Blackie had been working on the hardware. They were calling it Project Rho.

Os efeitos do Projeto Rho foram destruir duas galáxias. Uma galáxia foi destruída removendo a maioria de suas estrelas:

In Galaxy A, where billions of suns had gone through the stellar cycle of evolution for billions of years, there was scarcely a corporal’s guard of primaries left. It was a strange, almost a frightening sight. For with the loss of the suns the composition of the galaxy had changed to something never before seen in all the plenum of universes. Nearly every sun had had planets; nearly every planet remained behind when its sun was stolen. Now they roamed at random—uncontrolled, barren, uninhabited—lacking not only the light and heat of their primaries, but freed from their gravitational reins as well.

As estrelas da galáxia A foram teletransportadas para a galáxia dos Cloranos, que por sua vez causou Está estrelas a explodir:

Thus millions upon millions of Chloran planets were destroyed without any intelligent entity either giving or receiving warning that an attack was being made....

They died in uncounted trillions. The greeny-yellow soup that served them for air boiled away. Their halogenous flesh was charred, baked and desiccated in the split-second of the passing of the wave front from each exploding double star, moments before their planets themselves began to seethe and boil. Many died unaware. Most died fighting. Some died in terrible, frantic efforts to escape...

But they all died.

No Jornada nas Estrelas episódio "O fator alternativo", 30 em março 1967, Foi revelada uma ameaça altamente não científica de destruir todo o nosso universo, além de um outro alternativo, a destruição em uma escala que faz a mera destruição em toda a galáxia parecer infinitesimal:

KIRK: What's going on? This leaping from universe to universe. This wild talk about a murdering creature who destroys civilisations What's the purpose?

SPOCK: Jim, madness has no purpose or reason, but it may have a goal. He must be stopped, held. Destroyed if necessary.

KIRK: I don't follow you.

SPOCK: Two parallel universes project this. One positive, the other negative. Or, more specifically, one matter, the other antimatter.

KIRK: Do you know what you're saying? Matter and antimatter have a tendency to cancel each other out. violently.

SPOCK: Precisely. Under certain conditions, when two identical particles of matter and antimatter meet.

KIRK: Like Lazarus. Identical. Like both Lazarus', only one is matter and the other antimatter. If they meet.

SPOCK: Annihilation, Jim. Total, complete, absolute annihilation.

KIRK: Of everything that exists, everywhere.

E quando Kirk encontra o são-Lázaro:

KIRK: Antimatter?

LAZARUS: Here, yes.

KIRK: And if identical particles meet

LAZARUS: The end of everything. Civilisation, existence, all gone. I tried to stop him, Captain. That's why I took your dilithium crystals.

É claro que "The Alternative Factor" foi ao ar no 1967, depois de Skylark DuQuesne (1965) e Os Reis da Estrela (1947) foram publicados.

A possibilidade pode ser uma arma no romance de Edmond Hamilton, "The Star Kings". Essa arma era o "Disruptor", capaz de aniquilar vastas regiões do próprio espaço e, portanto, toda a matéria dentro dele.

Um tipo um pouco diferente de destruição em escala galáctica ocorre em "M33 em Andrômeda"* (1943) de AE ​​van Vogt, que mais tarde se tornou o encontro climático da correção A viagem do espaço Beagle.

A parte relevante do resumo da trama da Wikipedia:

In the last section, Anabis, a galaxy-spanning consciousness, is encountered. Once again, it is both malevolent, starving and aggressive, and under all circumstances must be prevented from following the ship back to any other galaxy. Anabis, which is essentially a galaxy-size will-o'-the-wisp, feeds off the death of living organisms, and has destroyed all intelligent life in its galaxy. It transforms all planets it can find into jungle planets through terraforming, since it is these kind of worlds that produce most life.

* A galáxia de Andrômeda é na verdade M31. M33, a galáxia do triângulo, é a terceira maior galáxia do mundo. grupo local, depois de Andrômeda e Via Láctea.

=> Existe uma "maldição" que poderia destruir toda a civilização fictícia em um livro chamado "The Magician's Nephew" (1955) de CS Lewis.

The Deplorable Word, as used in The Magician's Nephew, by author C. S. Lewis is a magical curse which ends all life in the fictional world of Charn except that of the one who speaks it.

=> Havia também este 'Modulador Espacial Explosivo Illudium PU-36' no clássico curta de Bugs Bunny Haredevil Hare em 1948. Marvin, o marciano, queria usá-lo para explodir a Terra porque, como ele disse, "obstrui minha visão de Vênus". O explosivo estava na forma de um pequeno bastão vermelho que lembrava Dynamite, que foi parafusado em uma grande máquina tipo telescópio.

=> Na série The Skylark of Space de EE Smith (escrita entre 1915-1921), vários assassinos de planetas são usados ​​ou discutidos. Jogando planetas e luas fora de órbita, bombas atômicas ou de cobre de alto rendimento, desmaterialização quase instantânea de objetos físicos e o teletransporte de cerca de cinquenta bilhões de estrelas, a fim de destruir uma civilização alienígena em toda a galáxia.