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"People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research. I just enjoy reading the stuff, and some of it sticks in my mind and fits into the stories."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Vibra-Transmitter (Teleportation) | ||
| An early use of the notion of matter transmission. |
| He stood, still in the pajamas he had worn in the prosaic safety of his Chicago bedroom, upon a circular plate of smooth, hard metal, flanked on either side by the banked tubes and massed dials of some strange apparatus, his position directly under the steady glare of a great blue-flaming dome light. Amazement struck him again, and overwhelming curiosity. He stared again at the man in the acid-spotted smock, his eyes taking in the curious costume, half that of the confined sedentary scientist, half that of an outdoor huntsman.
"Where am I?" Girand demanded at last, after a moment of mutual appraisal... He found himself standing on the cool metal floor of a huge room, whose distant roof lost itself in shadowy vagueness high above. The room was crowded, filled almost to capacity by endless rows of apparatus of complexity and uses unguessable. "My laboratory," [Granton] said simply. "I suppose you're wondering how you got here. That plate from which you just stepped is the receiving instrument of my vibra-transmitter; I've just finished reintegrating the matter of your body. The beam into which you walked in your bedroom simply reduced your body to vibration which is carried on a returning wave-channel to the plate here... And you came." |
| Technovelgy from Into the Meteorite Orbit,
by Frank K. Kelly. Published by Teck Publications in 1933 Additional resources -
|
This is an early example of this technovelgy; note that effort made to explain how it works. By the time you get to Larry Niven's stepping discs from his 1970 novel Ringworld, you not only have less apparatus, but less explanation as well.
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'Space-sickness is one of the most unpleasant sensations that a human being can experience. Not all are subject to it...'
'...I saw a nice black heavy-looking cloud sailing by just now, and I can get the electrical machine out in five minutes to draw it down.'
'From a distance it could resolve the cosmic rays reflected from various substances.'
'The answer to the dumb student's prayer.'
'He had travelled the space-lanes of the solar system for the greater part of his life...'
'The dinner was excellent. It was completely vegetarian — grown in specially prepared gardens in this Moon base...'
'Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.'
'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
