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"I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development."
- Arthur C. Clarke

Bat Wings  
  The dream of human-powered winged flight becomes a reality - in low gravity, of course.  

In this excerpt from the novel, the inhabitants of an orbiting habitat take time for recreation.

There were wings attached to hooks at the entrance. McLeve took down a set and began strapping them on. Black bat wings. They made him look like a fallen angel, Milton's style. He handed me another pair. "Like to fly?" he asked...

I was a tiny chick in a vast eggshell. The landscape was wrapped around me: fields and houses... Every direction was down.

Technovelgy from Limits, by Larry Niven.
Published by Del Rey in 1985
Additional resources -

This is from Spirals a short story by Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

Hang gliding is a similar sport; it gained popularity in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Hang gliding is based on a technology developed in 1948 called the "parawing", a V-shaped flexible airfoil made of fabric. NASA showed early interest in using it for returning space craft.

As alert readers have pointed out, Robert Heinlein originated this idea almost thirty years earlier in The Menace From Earth - see the entry for Bat's Wings. For a different take on this idea, see the Dragonfly sky-bike from Rendezvous With Rama (1972) by Arthur C. Clarke.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Limits
  More Ideas and Technology by Larry Niven
  Tech news articles related to Limits
  Tech news articles related to works by Larry Niven

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