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"Bureaucracies hide their mistakes, because people's careers are tied to those mistakes. Therefore, bureaucracies are a perfect mechanism for perpetuating mistakes."
- Frank Herbert
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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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'...they moved with the ease of dandelion puffs.'
'...some bored drone pusher in a remote driving centre...'
'These pods were programmed to hang in space in a hexagonal grid pattern...'
'...the meteor caught and halted just as a small boy catches a swift ball in his cap.'
'We have decided that it shall be but one ship... it must contain everything needed to take us through the generations.'
'You’re the robopsychologist of the plant, so you’re to study the robot itself...'
