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"The way you write science fiction is: you sit down at your writing machine and you open your mind to the first thought that comes through."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Telectroscope | ||
| A much better telescope than yours. |
| "...let's all take a look at old Sol from a distance that no man ever reached before!”
THEY started for the telectroscope room. Morey joined them, and as Arcot put the view of old Sol and his family on the telectroscope screen, and increased the magnification to its maximum, they looked eagerly at the system. The sun glowed brilliantly, and the whirling planets showed plainly... ...Let’s turn the ship so the telectroscope can take in that field.” Arcot walked, or tried to walk, forward, but as all power had been cut off, save the meteor protection, there was no weight, and their motion was a series of long dives, and since the control room and the observatory were in line, Arcot made a single dive to his destination. The walls of the rooms and the corridors had been equipped with hand grips. The others reached for hand grips, and Arcot swung the car gently about on its axis, till the observatory was pointing toward Sirius, the brightest star in our heavens, and from this much lesser distance it shone as a brilliant point of light that blazed wonderfully. They turned the telectroscope toward it, but there was little they could see that was not visible from Earth, or from the big observatories on the Moon or Uranus. |
| Technovelgy from Islands of Space,
by John W. Campbell. Published by Amazing Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Campbell also uses this item in the following year, in his story Invaders from the Infinite:
The sun shifted from the center of the screen, and a smaller reddish-green disc came into view — a planet, its atmosphere coloring the light that left it toward the red. It rushed nearer, grew larger. Earth spread as it took the center of the screen. A world, a portion of a world, a continent, a fragment of a continent as the magnification increased, boundlessly it seemed.
Finally, New York spread across the screen; New York seen from the air, with a strange lack of perspective. The buildings did not seem all to slant toward some point, but to stand vertical, for, from a distance of a billion miles, the vision lines were practically parallel.
Seated at the controls once more, he snapped the little switch that caused the screen to glow with flashing, swirling colors as the telectroscope apparatus came to life. A thousand tiny points of flame appeared scattered on a black field with a suddenness that made them seem to snap suddenly into being. Points, tiny dimensionless points of light, save one, a tiny disc of blue-white flame, old Sol from a distance of close to one billion miles, and under slight reverse magnification. The skillful hands at the controls were turning adjustments now, and that disc of flame seemed to leap toward him with a hundred light-speeds, growing to a disc as large as a dime in an instant, while the myriad points of the stars seemed to scatter like frightened chickens, fleeing from the growing sun, out of the screen. Other points, heretofore invisible, appeared, grew, and rushed away.
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More Ideas
and Technology from Islands of Space
More Ideas
and Technology by John W. Campbell
Tech news articles related to Islands of Space
Tech news articles related to works by John W. Campbell
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| JWST Finds Bucking Centaur 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 |
| First Trips To Mars Announced By Elon Musk |
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'...the rocket’s landing-arms automatically unfolded.'
'...points and patches of light... sliding all over their faces in a programmed manner that had been designed to foil facial recognition systems.'
'...the combined Wind-Suncatcher, like a spray of tulips mounted fanwise.'
'I went to the control room where the three other men were manipulating their mechanical men.'
'The low-slung monorail car, straddling its single track, bored through the shadows on a slowly rising course.'
'It was a smooth ovoid floating a few inches from the floor...'
'... he thrust in his charging arm to replenish his store of energy.'
'...the terrible Jovian gravity that made each movement an effort.'
