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"[Science fiction] is the one literary medium left in which we have a free hand. We can do any damn thing we please."
- Alfred Bester
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| Anemopter | ||
| Special craft for journeys through the atmosphere of a gas giant planet. |
This created word is a portmanteau of ánemos (wind) and pteron (wing). Just for fun, see the origin of the term gas giant.
| The boat-like anemopter that Valadez had sent for them had a cruising speed of just less than the speed of sound, which in this part of Sky’s atmosphere meant about nine hundred kilometers per hour. The speed, Bianca thought, might have been calculated to bring home the true size of Sky, the impossible immensity of it. It had taken the better part of their first day’s travel for the anemopter’s point of departure, the ten-kilometer, billion-ton vacuum balloon Transient Meridian, to drop from sight—the dwindling golden droplet disappearing, not over the horizon, but into the haze. From that Bianca estimated that the bowl of clouds visible through the subtle blurring of the anemopter’s static fields covered an area about the size of North America...
She followed it forward to the anemopter’s rounded prow. The naturalist, Erasmus Fry, was already there, resting his elbows on the rail, looking down. |
| Technovelgy from Finisterra,
by David Moles. Published by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2007 Additional resources -
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Compare to the kite-copter car in The Kokod Warriors (1952) by Jack Vance.
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'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.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
