Author Kim Stanley Robinson also envisaged such cables in his "Mars" trilogy. One on earth had to be bifurcated ("Y" shaped) near the base so that one leg was anchored in Trinidad and the other in Tobago.

In "Red Mars", terrorists separate a cable on Mars from its geosynchronous anchor (a captured asteroid named "Clarke"). The falling cable wraps itself two and a half times round the planet. A similar catastrophe on earth would result in a cable falling almost but not quite once round the world.