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"People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research. I just enjoy reading the stuff, and some of it sticks in my mind and fits into the stories."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Transfer Cable | ||
| Move between two ships in space. |
This is an early description of a way to move between two ships in space - string a cable between the ships, don spacesuits and off you go.
| ...a heavy magnetic anchor leaped from its catapult toward the passing ship, dragging its cable. It struck the liner's hull, clung fast.
Like a silver fish, the Bellatrix plunged and darted for a time upon the line. But the smaller station held her adroitly, giving her opportunity neither to ram nor to break the cable. And steadily the ships were drawn together as the cable was wound upon its drum.
 (Transfer cable from 'Dead Star Station' by Jack Williamson) Five minutes later, the eleven of us were dragging ourselves across between the ships in clumsy, inflated suits, laden with weapons. As weird a journey as can be imagined, it was. Eleven swollen giants, climbing by their hands along a cable between two vessels in the void. For background, the flaming streamers of the Great Nebula, and the malign black disk of the Dead Star. |
| Technovelgy from Dead Star Station,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1933 Additional resources -
|
Here's a somewhat mechanized version of this same idea, a ship-to-ship passage in 2010: The Year We Make Contact:
(Passageway between ships in 2010 (movie))
Compare to the tubular space-gangway from The Star Roamers (1933) by Edmond Hamilton and the space tunnel from The Man Who Bought Mars (1941) by Polton Cross.
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'The pitiless M rays pierced Earth and steel and densest concrete as if they were so much transparent glass...'
'Pina2bo would have to operate full blast for many years to put as much SO2 into the stratosphere as its namesake had done in a few minutes.'
'Nanny is different,' Tom Fields murmured... 'she's not like a machine. She's like a person.'
'We made a crude , small cell and were delighted - and, I admit, somewhat surprised - to find it worked.'
'...we've promised him a generous pension from the royalties.'
'The clothes and jewelery drew their tiny power requirements from her movements.'
'At the end of each appendage's eight fingers there are tinier appendages...'
'We want to do something to help those who are suffering from tooth loss or absence,' said lead researcher Katsu Takahashi.
