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"[Science fiction is] anything that turns you and your social context, the social you, inside out."
- Gregory Benford
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| Guided Missile Control Station | ||
| An orbital missile base. |
This is an early description of what today is called an orbital weapons platform.
| Circum-Terra was a great confused mass in the sky. It had been built, rebuilt, added to, and modified over the course of years for a dozen different purposes - weather observation station, astronomical observatory, meteor count station, television relay, guided missile control station, high-vacuum strain-free physics laboratory, strain-free germ-free biological experiment station, and many other uses...
"Don't you realize that the war is already over? Man, this place isn't just a traffic depot; it's the main guided-missile control station. They can bomb every last city on Earth from here, like ducks in a pond!" |
| Technovelgy from Between Planets,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1951 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the space station from Flaming Frontiers (1934) by Bernard Buley. See also the discussion of the space platform from E.B. White's excellent 1950 short story The Morning of the Day for an earlier example.
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| Russians Create Robot Tank Platoons |
| Unmanned Boats Attack At Sea |
| Iron Drone Raider Counter-UAV Operations |
| Bunker Busters and Bore-Pellets |
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'...small electric motors at the principal joints worked the prosthetic framework by means of steel cables...'
'Living protoplasm incorporated into the Ampek F-a2 recording system...'
'Twoflower's Luggage, which was currently ambling along on its little legs...'
'He came to as the ship went into free flight, arching in a high parabola over the plains...'
'The peculiar quality of this light, which gave it its great preeminence over all other penetrating rays...'
'The overworked leg motor would have to cool down before he could work on it...'
‘Where to, sport?’ the starter at cab relay asked.
