Latest By
Category:
Armor
Artificial
Intelligence
Biology
Clothing
Communication
Computers
Culture
Data Storage
Displays
Engineering
Entertainment
Food
Input Devices
Lifestyle
Living Space
Manufacturing
Material
Media
Medical
Miscellaneous
Robotics
Security
Space Tech
Spacecraft
Surveillance
Transportation
Travel
Vehicle
Virtual
Person
Warfare
Weapon
Work
"As a writer, I don't want to chew my cud. I don't want to have to spit out and regurgitate the same stuff again."
- Harlan Ellison
 |
| Aircab | ||
| A flying autonomous taxi cab. |
| The music that the cab had been playing died away. "Paratime Building, just below," it said, in a light feminine voice. "Which landing stage, please?" Vall leaned forward and punched at the buttons in front of him. Something in the cab's electronic brain gave a rapid series of clicks as it shifted from the general Paratime Building beam to the beam of the Paratime Police landing stage, then it said, "Thank you." The building below seemed to rotate upward toward them as it settled down. Then the antigrav-field snapped off, the cab door popped open, and the cab said: "Good-by, now. Ride with me again, sometime." |
| From Time Crime,
by H. Beam Piper. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1955 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the tin cabby from the 1957 novel Cities in Flight by James Blish and to the automatic automobile from David H. Keller's 1935 story The Living Machine.
Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This |
Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Time Crime
More Ideas
and Technology by H. Beam Piper
Tech news articles related to Time Crime
Tech news articles related to works by H. Beam Piper
| Electric Unicycle Is A Tumblebug |
| No Autonomous Trucks? Wait, What? |
| Elon Musk's Traffic Tunnel Challenge Is Boring |
| HVSD, Kitty Hawk's Electric Plane |
Want to Contribute an
Item?
It's easy:
Get the name of the item, a
quote, the book's name and the author's name, and Add
it here.
| <Previous | Next> |
|
|
|
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
|
'A tumblebug does not give a man dignity, since it is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized on a single wheel.'
'It was time - time to go again. She touched the leaf. She was wanted.'
'It's rewiring things... squeezing silver toothpaste in a ribbon along the printed circuitry.'
'There was a heap of discarded ore where Grantline had carted and dumped it...'
