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"Tokyo homeless people reiterate the whole nature of living in Tokyo in cardboard boxes, they're only slightly smaller than Tokyo apartments, and they have almost as many consumer goods. It's a nightmare of boxes within boxes."
- William Gibson
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| Radio Meteor Detector | ||
| A device carried by space ships that could detect meteors in space early enough to avoid them. |
| "We can't reach any great velocity without accelerating for so long a time, that we would take a lifetime to make the round trip, and if we hit anything more massive than a dust grain at that speed, we would be going at so terrific a rate that we would be volatilized." He looked curiously at Arcot. Then he added, "And, going faster than light, our radio meteor detectors would be useless, the beams would be going backwards when they went from behind, and would never go ahead of us so as to leave us in front!" |
| Technovelgy from Islands of Space,
by John W. Campbell. Published by Amazing Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Here's a variation on this phrase from Planet of the Small Men by Murray Leinster, published in Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1950:
Compare to meteor-spotting radar from Recoil (1943) by George O. Smith and Meteor Warning System from A Conquest of Two Worlds (1932) by Edmond Hamilton.
It went into overdrive too, and for the first time in all history meteor-detectors rang a strident, continuous alarm signal while a human ship sped through emptiness at two hundred times the speed of light. Which meant that another solid object was within detector-range and stayed there.
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
