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"Everything starts as somebody's daydream. And, when you're daydreaming, it is science fiction. It's when you start work out how you put it together, true science fiction becomes real science."
- Larry Niven
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| Stratocar | ||
| A vehicle intended for use in traveling through the upper atmosphere. |
A specialized vehicle; not for use in driving on the surface (ground-car), or in the air but close to the ground (air-car), or to orbit (Joy Boat Junior.
Although, Zagat himself used stratoyacht to describe a ship able to fly up to orbit. I think Heinlein used "strato-yacht" in Methuselah's Children (1941).
| "Swell," Jay applauded. "But what's to do now? We can't climb that mountain. It must be fifty miles high."
"Into space suits," I snapped. "And the Phobos carries a small stratocar as a lifeboat. If there's any atmosphere at all, and there must be or there wouldn't be any clouds, that will take us up there quicker than we came down..." The buzzing hum of the stratocar's hydroxy motor battered against the side of that incredible mountain as we lifted straight up to its summit... Our stratocar still perched, birdlike on the outer ledge. |
| Technovelgy from The Cavern of the Shining Pool,
by Leo Zagat. Published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1937 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the air-car from A Matter of Size (1934) by Harry Bates.
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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.'
