Orion may have been featured in fiction somewhere, but it was actually proposed in the 1950's as a serious spacecraft design. It would have been propelled by the explosion of nuclear devices, and could theoretically travel to the stars, although not at a very fast rate (but better than conventional fuels would do by far). It sounds like enough work was done to demonstrate that it actually would have been possible to build, but a treaty banning nuclear explosions in space prevented further work.