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"As the rate of technological development speeds up, the gap between science fiction and what we’re living now is getting narrower all the time."
- Richard Morgan
 |
| Hand-Jetting | ||
| Making use of hand-held rockets or other reaction devices to move through space. |
| He just couldn't think of life without the joy and lift that comes of plunging into space with the controls of a thousand thunders under the fingertips. What surface job offered the thrill of hand-jetting across ten miles of bucking emptiness to make fast a line to an inert wreck ? |
| Technovelgy from A Question of Salvage,
by Malcolm Jameson. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1939 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the reaction pistol from Martian Guns (1932) by Stanley D. Bell, the metal solvent ray thrower from Lost Rocket (1941) by Manly Wade Wellman and the Pistol 'Rocket' (1931) from Buck Rogers: 2430 AD (1931) by Nowlan and Calkin.
Also, compare this method of moving between objects in space with the spring-loaded broomstick from Arthur C. Clarke's 1952 story Islands in the Sky, Personal Jet Thrust from Robert Heinlein's 1948 novel Space Cadet and Electrical Tether from Garrett P. Serviss' 1898 story Edison's Conquest of Mars.
I can't resist this perfect match from the 2019 movie The Martian, when character Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) goes "full-Iron Man" to save himself by actually "hand-jetting":
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| Capturing Asteroids With Nets |
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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!'
