Shattered World

Guys, when did we break off?

In settings taking place on a planet, the planet is generally in one piece.

In a Shattered World, this is not the case.

Maybe magic or science has Gone Horribly Wrong, causing an Earthshattering Kaboom, or maybe something else bad has happened, but a former planet is now broken into small pieces, floating through space. If this trope is used as a setting, these pieces will usually have settlements of some sort on them (not to be confused with Asteroid Thickets, which are normally just obstacles).

Unlike a Floating Continent, a Shattered World isn't hovering over a planet.

If the pieces are somehow hovering in an atmosphere with gravity, that's World in the Sky.

Examples of Shattered World include:

Anime and Manga

• Scrapped Princess: The land which the work take place on is actually a big landmass broken off from Earth by aliens.
• KO Century 3 Beast Warriors takes place in a future where the Earth is split in half.
• Dead Leaves was so named for the resemblance to the shattered moon in the sky, explicitly noted in the anime.

Comic Books

• The Triceraton homeworld in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mirage is one of these. After the planet exploded, the Triceratons converted the different chunks into Floating Continent spaceships, which now comprise the backbone of the Triceraton fleet.
• Somewhere in the 70s, Marvel Comics introduced Xandar, the homeworld of the Nova Corps. As part of its backstory, it was shattered and made into 4 interlinked habitats. (Summarily destroyed in 2005, in the start of Annihilation).
• Earth itself was like this for some time before the first reboot of the Legion of Super-Heroes, being destroyed by the Dominators and rebuilt as a series of floating, interlinked, domed cities.

Film

• The penultimate scene of The Film of the Book The Neverending Story.
• In Galaxy Quest there is one shown as the Protector leaves the dock.

Literature

• The Star Wars Extended Universe has lots of these, including the Taspan system and the Graveyard of Alderaan.
• In Brian Earnshaw's book Dragonfall 5 and the Space Cowboys, pieces of a small planet, called The Broken World. Inhabited by cowboy ranchers and actual blue grass.
• In The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, the earth is split into 7 pieces each with their associated elements. Their exact location in relation to each other is unclear however whether they are in our solar system or separate dimensions.
• The Shattered World, and its sequel, The Burning Realm, by Michael Reaves.
• Many older SF books mentioned that the Solar System's asteroid belt is the remnants of a rocky planet Phaeton. See also Real Life section.
  • In Stranger in A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein, there's a line that says it was destroyed by the Martians.
  • In Robert A. Heinlein's Space Cadet the heroes find that Phaeton was destroyed in a nuclear accident.
  • In David Weber's Dahak series alien invaders hit it with a big rock to destroy First Imperium military base.
    • Many more asteroid belts are found in other systems left after Fourth Imperium's civil war.
  • In Fredric Brown's Letter to a Phoenix the rebellious colony on the fifth planet was destroyed with the planet.

Tabletop Games

• One high-level adventure for the Mystara D&D setting brings the heroes to what's left of Old Alphatia, a planet destroyed by feuding wizards two thousand years ago. As these same wizards had previously enveloped their entire solar system with breathable air, some of the orbiting shards of their world are found to still be populated.
• In Spelljammer, the Astromundi Cluster with its asteroid leftovers of the two collided planets may qualify. Also, the elves managed to break a few planets into those. And homeworld of the Reigar (they went a little overboard with performance art themselves), though "currently" it's a legend rather than a known place.
• Race For The Galaxy has one of these, but it's generally one of the least useful cards to play on your tableau, as it's worth both very few victory points, and generally doesn't provide any resources at all.

Toys

• In Bionicle, the planet of Spherus Magna split into Bara Magna, Aqua Magna, and Bota Magna due to the Shattering.

Video Games

• There are those who think that the Borderworld of Xen from Half Life is something like this. The Nihilanth's original home planet was destroyed in a war against The Combine, and, in his retreat, he transported the fragments, atmosphere, and some of the wildlife to Xen.
• The setting of the MMO Aion: The Tower of Eternity. The war between the demonic Balaur and the holy Empyrean Lords destroyed the titular Tower of Eternity and split the planet of Atreia into 2 halves- the dark upper half became the home of those who would become the shadowy Asmodians, the brightly lit lower half the realm of the radiant Elyos.
• The Chronicles of Spellborn
• The Shadow Shard from City of Heroes.
• High Charity from Halo is a mobile version of this.
• Malachor 5 in Knights of the Old Republic: The Sith Lords.
  • Peragus in the same game may be a partial example as it has a large chunk blown out due to a mining accident. The first level of the games takes place in a mining within a large asteroid in orbit around the planet.
• The setting of Sacrifice is a world that was shattered in a war between the gods.
• After Sonic gets tricked into giving the Chaos Emeralds to Dr. Robotnik, the world ends up broken like this in Sonic Unleashed and it's then Sonic's job to fix everything.
• Rock Star from Kirby 64 The Crystal Shards is this.
• The planet in Star Fox Adventures had this happen, and the main quest is to put it back together before it gets more shattered and destroys the whole system with it.
• The PS2 game Vexx was set on an exploded planet, various parts of which are scattered across the sky, with each level being a different one. there is a definite downwards direction, with it being possible (and infuriatingly easy) to fall off the edge.
• The Great Spiral in Wizard 101 is one of these held in a spiral. Each island rock or rock cluster is called a world with a unique theme and races. Transport between the worlds of the spiral happens through Cool Gates.
  • It was created when the grandfather tree using the pieces the first world that was shattered by a war between the three great races.
• Outland, the remains of the planet Draenor shattered by demonic energies, is the main setting for the first expansion of World of Warcraft.
  • The Sundering in Cataclysm nearly reduced Azeroth to this. Only timely intervention by the Earthen Ring prevented complete devastation.
• After blowing up a planet, you can colonize the resultant asteroid field in earlier games in the Space Empires series. You are unable to colonize asteroids anymore as of SEIV. Note that you can also create planets in the games, and you can accidentally (or intentionally) create a planet out of the asteroid colony.
• On is shown in Tachyon the Fringe in a Bora-controlled mining sector. It is likely that Bora themselves did it in order to better mine the planet's resources.
• Star Trek Online: There are are a large number of these in the various systems in the game. Too many to list. Notably the Romulus system.
• The Age of Spire from the fourth Myst game: According to the supplemental materials, it was a planet whose magnetic core became unstable, which repelled large chunks of metal (and lots of attached rock) right out of the planet. Enough time has gone by that the collective gravitational attraction of the chunks towards the center has reached equilibrium with the magnetic repulsion, long enough that the giant floating fragments have enough gravity to have an atmosphere and even some flora.
• The world begins much like this in Legend of Mana - various lands were ripped up and turned into artifacts, which it falls upon the protagonist to piece back together however they prefer. (Of course, they say from the beginning that it's All Just a Dream, so...)
• Bastion, full stop. As you traverse through the assorted levels, the ground underneath the Kid's feet comes together and falls apart at the slightest whim, even disregarding his habit of wantonly smashing everything he sees into bite-sized chunks.
• Ar tonelico takes place on a floating continent and a humongous tower floating over a devastated, uninhabitable planet.
• In The Tone Rebellion the goal is to reassemble your broken planet.

Web Original

• The world of Remnant in RWBY has a Shattered Moon in its sky.

Western Animation

• The Moon in the final shot of the Bugs Bunny / Marvin Martian short "Haredevil Hare".
• Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century (the original short), which also starred Marvin Martian.
• Atmos from Storm Hawks, probably.
  • Actually, since there's clearly solid (though uninhabitable) land down below, Atmos is more of a Floating Continent world.
• The French-Canadian cartoon Skyland takes place on a still-habitable shattered Earth
• Transformers: Cybertron, while not completely shattered, does have some chunks missing out of it.

Real Life

• The Earth and the Moon.
  • A now-discredited theory held that the Earth spun so fast in its early days that a globule fissioned off, forming the Moon.
  • Currently the Giant Impact Hypothesis is the big one. It's oddly not all that different from the fission theory. A Mars-sized object hit the Earth about 4.4 billion years ago and threw out enough material to form the Moon.
• In a previous theory of the formation of The Solar System (now discredited), the asteroid belt was the remains of a fifth planet, Phaeton. Current theory instead says that Jupiter's gravity prevented the material in the asteroid belt from coalescing into a planet in the first place.
• Some of the chunkier rings of the Solar System's Gas Giants may have once been fragile moons, torn apart by impacts or tidal forces. Some of the stranger moons appear to have formed from some of these large fragments colliding and having enough mutual gravitational attraction to stick.
• Early space-probe images of Miranda, one of the moons of Uranus, depicted such a patchwork of terrain that it's been theorized that this small moon was once shattered, then re-coalesced from its scattered pieces.