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"SF looks towards an imaginary future, while fantasy, by and large, looks towards an imaginary past."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Beeper | ||
| A handheld radar set, used to find items that have drifted off. |
| A beeper is a tiny radar set, not much bigger than a hand torch, which is used to locate objects that have drifted away from the station. It's got a range of a few miles on anything as large as a space suit and could pick up a ship a lot farther away. You wave it around in space, and when its beam hits anything you hear a series of "beeps." The closer you get to the reflecting object, the faster the beeps come, and with a little practice you can judge distances pretty accurately. |
| Technovelgy from Islands in the Sky,
by Arthur C. Clarke. Published by Not known in 1952 Additional resources -
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'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
'It hurtled on down with inconceivable speed until it was visible as thousands of tiny robot planes...'
