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"The world is really so surreal these days that it's necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. The artist functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are."
- William Gibson
 |
| Planoforming | ||
| A form of "faster than light" travel allows for interstellar travel. |
| "Planoforming was sort of funny. It felt like like— Like nothing much. Like the twinge of a mild electric shock. Like the ache of a sore tooth bitten on for the first time. Like a slightly painful flash of light against the eyes. Yet in that time, a forty-thousand-ton ship lifting free above Earth disappeared somehow or other into two dimensions and appeared half a light-year or fifty light-years off." |
| Technovelgy from The Game of Rat and Dragon,
by Cordwainer Smith. Published by Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953 Additional resources -
|
See the jump through hyperspace from Isaac Asimov's 1951 novel Foundation, another early use of the FTL travel idea.
The earliest use of the FTL idea was probably the inertialess drive from E.E. 'Doc' Smith's 1934 novel Triplanetary.
Thanks to Gatomon41 for submitting this item!
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Game of Rat and Dragon
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Tech news articles related to works by Cordwainer Smith
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