NOTES
Energy dissipation (including variations that don't work in our universe) show up frequently in science fiction - sometimes on purpose, and sometimes by accident. Here are a few examples that occurred to me while I was planning this talk.
Angular momentum conservation and the extraction of energy out of a system are the themes in two puzzles stories - one from 1938, and one from 1983. In one story, the characters are sliding on a nearly frictionless concave surface - can they figure out how to escape before the slight friction ends up leaving them motionless and stuck at the center? In the other story, an orbital farm has plenty of solar energy, but needs to periodically use reaction mass to keep its orbit from decaying - or does it?
Other stories deal with the dissipation of energy in general - often deliberately dealing with alternate laws of physics, such as in the first three cases, each of which reverses the second law of thermodynamics. The last case appears to be inadvertent - a plot line involves heating Mars using windmills, in other words, converting the energy of the wind into heat, rather than allowing the wind to disperse naturally into the same amount of heat.