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"The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Glassite | ||
| A transparent material of great strength. |
| And there were humans here now. On this tumbled plain, between Archimedes and the mountains, one small crater amid the million of its fellows was distinguished this night by the presence of humans. The Grantline camp!
...The third building seemed a lean-to banked against the cliff wall, a slanting shed-wall of glassite fifty feet high and two hundred in length. Under it, for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff. Braced tunels were hewn penetrating back and downward into the vein of rock. |
| Technovelgy from Brigands of the Moon,
by Ray Cummings. Published by Astounding Stories of Super Science in 1930 Additional resources -
|
The same word appears in Edmond Hamilton's Sargasso of Space, which was published at just about the same time:
Here's another usage from Phantom of the Seven Stars (1940) by Ray Cummings; this one is on a space ship:
Compare to artificial transparent element from Last and First Men (1930) by Olaf Stapledon,
neo-crystal from Master of the Asteroid (1932) by Clark Ashton Smith,
transparent car roof from Sinister Barrier (1939) by Eric Frank Russell,
plani glass from Crystalized Thought (1937) by Nat Schachner,
thermalite from Planet of Eternal Night (1939) by John W. Campbell and slow glass from Light of Other Days (1968) by Bob Shaw.
THEY climbed back, up to the ship's top, and leapt off it toward a Jupiter freighter lying a little farther inside the pack. As they floated toward it, Kent saw their men moving on with them from ship to ship, progressing inward into the pack. Both Kent and Liggett kept Krell always ahead of them, knowing that a blow from his bar, shattering their glassite helmets, meant instant death. But Krell seemed quite intent on the search for fuel.
We were sitting under the glassite pressure-dome on the forepeak of the Seven Stars, bathed in the pallid starlight.
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Tech news articles related to Brigands of the Moon
Tech news articles related to works by Ray Cummings
| Harvard Metamaterials Change Structure Instantly |
| Nano-Chainmail 2D Mechanically Interlocked Polymer |
| Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick |
| GNoME AI From DeepMind Invents Millions Of New Materials |
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
