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"Does it open a new horizon for my thinking? Does it lead me to think new kinds of thoughts, that I would not otherwise perhaps have thought at all? These qualities are what [make] science fiction ...unique."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Air Suit | ||
| A simple kind of outfit that needed only oxygen for its occupant. |
The sun, unaccountably, had gone out.
This thing could not happen, which was happening.
What is a researcher to do when he must go outside his surface laboratory?
A planet that had witnessed these other things, and a host of lesser catastrophes, darkened now as the central luminary died a mysterious death. Mysterious, because the science of the little, two-legged, upright creatures living on earth’s surface could find no reason for the phenomenon. Their glib theories had demanded that the sun continue to puff away its vast bulk in radiant energy, at the rate of thousands of tons per second, for billions of years. Earth, they cried, must continue to receive its portion of this invisible power for those many ages. That was down on paper. That had to be.
| Wacker strode to a wall cupboard from which he extracted a jumper outfit of thick neo-rubber, resilient at the extremes of low temperature. Maida kissed him, then helped him fit the aluminium helmet over his head and join it to the neck piece with liquid neorubber. Waving a farewell, the youngscientist swung open the felt-lined lock door, stepped into the dark interior of the seal...
PHIL WACKER found breathing hard by the time he had left the air lock and stepped outside. He strode to the near-by drift of solidified air, scraped away the upper layers, which contained hydrogen and helium to excess, and scooped his heavily gloved hand into the virgin air snow. He stuffed several handfuls into the container on his chest and opened the valves carefully. The little battery that heated the interior of his suit also warmed the resistance coil over which the cold gases flowed on their Way in. Pie took a deep breath of fresh air. After an exhaustive flexing of his legs and arms to see that the suit was quite fit to preserve life from the demons of cold and airlessness, Wacker began bis journey. He swung along in the stiff air suit. Through his vision plate the ultra-frigid wastes greeted him mockingly. The ice god had usurped a world that had once been his and his peoples, and had driven them underground, with the worms. |
| Technovelgy from When the Sun Went Out,
by Eando Binder. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1937 Additional resources -
|
The earliest specific reference to the idea of a space suit is in Edison's Conquest of Mars, an 1898 novel by Garrett P. Serviss; see this article on air-tight dress.
The earliest use of the phrase "space suit" that I've found is from The Emperor of the Stars. a 1931 short story by the great team of Schachner and Zagat.; see space suit. Also, see the somewhat less formal space overalls from Lost Rocket, a short story by Manly Wade Wellman.
Compare to these other early space suit references;
the air-tight suit from Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898) by Garrett P. Serviss, the pneumatic suit from The Shot into Infinity (1929) by Otto Willi Gail, the altitude suit from The Black Star Passes by John W. Campbell and the Osprey Space Armor from Salvage in Space (1933) by Jack Williamson.
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'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
'I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh.'
'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
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