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"What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Lunar Web | ||
| The moon ensnared by cobwebs. |
A fascinating (and fantastic!) visualization of the long afternoon of our Earth.
| The traverser, a gross vegetable-equivalent of a spider, was descending to the Tips…
The traverser was descending slowly, a great bladder with legs and jaws, fibery hair covering most of its bulk… It was like a god, with the powers of a god. It came down on a cable, floated nimbly down the strand trailing up into the sky. As far as could be seen, cables slanted up from the jungle, pointing like slender, drooping fingers to heaven… They all trailed up in the same direction, toward a floating silver half-globe, remote and cool, but clearly visible even in the glare of eternal sunshine… Unmoving, steady, the half-moon remained always in the same sector of the sky. |
| Technovelgy from Hothouse,
by Brian Aldiss. Published by Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1962 Additional resources -
|
Read the discussion about the space elevator, which has a rich history before and after the idea's treatment by sf writers.
This flight of fancy on the part of Aldiss hearkens back to the earliest stirrings of science fiction. Take a look at the entry for weightlessness and the journey of the Gansas to the moon in Francis Godwin's 1638 novel The Man in the Moone.
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and Technology from Hothouse
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| Starship Special Edition For Lunar Shuttle |
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'Hocus-pocus religions and archaic weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.'
'Oscar picked up a trowel. 'I'm the tool for the mortar,' the little trowel squeaked cheerfully.'
'... he waited for the robotrix attendant to finish fueling up his ship.'
The Roujin Z system provides care to fully bedridden patients - and then some!
'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
