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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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| Rocket-Polo | ||
| Polo played with rocket-powered craft. |
| If you're one of those rarities who haven't attended a rocket-polo "carnage", let me tell you it's a colorful affair. In the first place, it's played at night against a backdrop of stars. Thousand-foot towers a mile apart constitute the ends of the playing field, surmounting which are huge, neon-outlined rings flaunting the colors of the respective teams.
 (Rocket Polo from Ra For The Rajah) Five small gyrotomics, their wings and fuselages etched in guarded neon-tubes, constitute a team. The ball is a five-foot, positively charged, helium-filled sphere which is thrust back and forth by plus-charged force beams in the 'tomic's noses. Picture that weaving, wavering crisscross of varicolored lights, intricately kaleidoscopic-illumined ships, flashing hither and yon - finely etched, winged bullets against infinity. |
| Technovelgy from Ra For The Rajah,
by John Victor Peterson. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1938 Additional resources -
|
My dad grew up in the late 1920's and 1930's, and he used to tell me about how his friends fixed up old Model T's and then used them to play polo on the city's municipal golf course. It turns out that there really was such a thing. The first match was a publicity stunt, but within a few years there was an Auto Polo Association that held games all over the country.
Compare to the battleroom from Ender's Game (1985) by Orson Scott Card, airpolo from Sunward Flight (1943) by Leo Zagat and to the description of air speedster Nyak-hunting from Foundation (1951) by Isaac Asimov.
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'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'Not like me. A T-1000, advanced prototype. A mimetic poly-alloy. Liquid metal.'
'It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'
'The massive feet working the pedals, arms and hands flashing and glinting...'
'There were cubic miles of it, and it glistened like a silvery Christmas tree...'
'Jason had been guiding the caravan of cars as usual...'
"The robot solemnly hit a ball against the wall, picked it up and teed it, hit it again, over and again...'
'There was a wall ahead... It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'
