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"...a lot of people find adventure on the Internet. That's their idea of being interactive. My idea of being interactive is going on out and doing it on the street."
- Harlan Ellison
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| Reaction Attachment | ||
| Independent maneuvering for space suits. |
| The crater seemed endless in length. I had plumbed its depth for miles when suddenly I shot down into a vast, spherical cavern. My body bobbed back and forth across this subterranean cavity like a pendulum, finally coming to rest in the very center. I floated free, as if in space. The crater had brought me into the very center of the asteroid. I shouted my discovery to Rourke. He replied — then his voice was cut off by a sharp click. Shadowy forms closed in upon me. Something seized my neck in a tight grip. Raising my atomic pistol, I fired into a hideous face which stared into mine. Dismal creatures on leathern wings flew all about me. Once again I fired my atom gun, this time over my shoulder. The clutch on my neck was released. I became aware of a strange atmosphere about me. A horny beak snapped at me as a dark form flapped past.
 (Reaction Attachment from 'The Asteroid of Death' by Neil R. Jones) With the reaction attachment on my suit, I propelled myself back in the direction of the shaft. The bat creatures attacked me viciously so that often I was hard set. My blazing atomic pistol cleared a way for me, and I shot up the shaft, the winged terrors of the asteroid in pursuit. They followed only a short distance, however. In the upper reaches of the crater, the atmosphere in which they lived became thin, eventually dying away into vacuum. |
| Technovelgy from The Asteroid of Death,
by Neil R. Jones. Published by Wonder Stories Quarterly in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Star Wars fans might be reminded of the mynocks:
Terrific description of exploring an asteroid:
I shall never forget my first glimpse of the asteroids. Our detector warned us that we were approaching one of the little worlds. We all watched through the transparent panelling of the port. The asteroid loomed before us, the far off sun lighting up its eerie crags. Like a jagged mountain it appeared, the shadows sharp etched in bold relief across the sunlit half. I judged the diameter of the planetoid to be five miles.
Compare to the self-propulsive space suit (illustrated!) from Anthony Gilmore's 1932 story The Bluff of the Hawk and the Self-Propelled Space Suit from The Cavern of the Shining Pool (1937) by Leo Zagat.
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and Technology from The Asteroid of Death
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and Technology by Neil R. Jones
Tech news articles related to The Asteroid of Death
Tech news articles related to works by Neil R. Jones
Reaction Attachment-related
news articles:
- Manned Maneuvering Unit From 1984
| Space Traffic Management (STM) Needed Now |
| Denmark Joins The 'Zero Debris Charter' To Clean Up Space |
| Starship Special Edition For Lunar Shuttle |
| 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!'
