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"I identify with the weak person; this is one reason why my fictional protagonists are essentially antiheroes."
- Philip K. Dick
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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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'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.'
