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"SF looks towards an imaginary future, while fantasy, by and large, looks towards an imaginary past."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Free Fall | ||
| Phrase describing how bodies move in orbit. |
First use of this phrase, as far as I know.
| Since the space ship, with exhausts cut off, was circling freely in space like any ordinary meteor, with no artificial influence to disturb the play of natural forces, the proximity of the moon was no hindrance to leaving the ship.
 ('The Shot into Infinity' by Otto Willi Gail) Kinetic energy and the attraction of the moon determined the motion of the Geryon and forced it into the curved gravitational path — the same forces as operated on the passengers and sought to move them in the same manner. As long as no artificial influence disturbed the dynamic equilibrium, no force drew the men who left the Geryon away from the ship, any more than the walking stick of a man falling from a high mountain has any inclination to leave its possessor during the fall. It remains at an unchanged distance from him, as long as the free fall lasts. The rocket and the Geryon seemed to lie still side by side, just like two express trains running side by side at full speed. A passenger on one express can shake hands out of the window with a passenger on the other. He can bridge the gap between the two trains with a board and pass from one train to the other. Nothing but the current of air, the road bed rushing away behind, and the noise of the rolling wheels would remind him that the whole system is in motion. Relatively to the rocket, the Geryon was motionless, and relatively to the Geryon, the passengers leaving it would float motionless in space. |
| Technovelgy from The Shot Into Infinity,
by Otto Willi Gail. Published by Science Wonder Quarterly in 1929 Additional resources -
|
Another noted early use can be found in Islands of Space by John W. Campbell:
See also zero g from Islands in the Sky (1952) by Arthur C. Clarke.
Since they were to use the space control, though, they would be subject to infinite acceleration, it would be a free fall, and Fuller would remain helplessly weightless.
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'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
'...the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and Then one toppled and fell. Then another.'
'Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space...'
'The men are dead, but their acquired wisdom lives on and I am the beneficiary.'
'Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting.'
'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
