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"If you have a gut response to a story, you are not responding to something new ..you are really responding to a story you were told when you were six or seven…"
- Samuel R. Delany
 |
| Conveyor Ribbon | ||
| A moving sidewalk. |
We see these most frequently today in airports.
| One had to be alert to pass across the series of progressively speeding conveyor ribbons to reach the central path that spiralled upward two hundred feet, then shot at sixty miles an hour along the radial street. He dimly remembered stumbling, someone hauling him upright, a shouted objurgation from a Traffic Controlman... |
| Technovelgy from Exiles of the Moon,
by Nat Schachner (w. AL Zagat). Published by Wonder Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
This passage describes how you cross conveyor ribbons at increasing (or decreasing) speeds:
Compare to the slidewalk from Sanity (1941), by Fritz Lieber.
In real life, demonstration-level sliding walkways were shown at the 1893 Chicago Exposition and the 1900 Paris Exposition. Take a look at this kinetoscope of the moving sidewalk from the 1900 Paris Exposition made by Thomas Edison.
Garry started to move outward, striding diagonally across the speed-graded belts, till he reached the stationary walk...
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'Provision had been made to meet the terrific cold which we knew would be encountered the moment we had passed beyond the atmosphere.'
'You are who we say you are, Dr. Dakin,' Turner said.'
'It's area, and its consequent light-gathering capacity, was many times greater than any rigid mirror...'
'Tell me your torments,' the Padre said, in an elderly voice marked with compassion.
'...a slender-legged tripod surmounted by a spherical body no larger than a football.'
'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
