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"At its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we can't predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe."
- John Brunner
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| Living Space Ship | ||
| A space ship made of a living substance, in this case cellulose. |
| It was egg-shaped and perfectly smooth. There was no sign of external girders, of protruding atmospheric-navigation fins, of escape-boat blisters. It was utterly featureless save for tiny spots which might be portholes, and rocket tubes in which intermittent flames flickered. It was still decelerating to match the speed and course of the Adastra.
"Have you got a spectroscope report on it?" asked Jack. "Yeh," replied the observations orderly. "An' I don't believe it. They're using rocket fuels - some organic compound. An' the report says the hull of that thing is cellulose, not metal. It's wood, on the outside." ...Helen gasped. A part of the side of the strange ship seemed to swell suddenly. It bulged out like a blister. It touched the surface of the Adastra. It seemed to adhere. The point of contact grew larger... |
| Technovelgy from Proxima Centauri,
by Murray Leinster. Published by Astounding Stories in 1935 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the treeships from Hyperion (1989) by Dan Simmons.
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'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain...'
'The observation vehicle was of that peculiar variety used in conveying a large number of people across rough terrain.'
'The real border was defended by... a swarm of quasi-independent aerostats.'
'I ... set my automatic astronomical instruments to searching for a habitable planet.'
'...haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?'
