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"Why does a creative person create? It's a type of compulsion. I like to explore new ideas."
- Bart Kosko
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| Artificial Sun | ||
| Use of a single large artifact to provide sunlight to a city or a world. |
This is the earliest use of the phrase "artificial sun" that I know about, but it is recreated in different forms in different stories.
In this tale, there is not only an artifical sun, but an entire sky!
| Buell was impressed, but it was not until he had been taken out under the artificial sun and sky and had learned its history that he began to have some realization of the power and resources of the man against whom he had pitted his relatively puny strength.
“At night,” said Odd, “the moon, stars and planets will come out and move across the sky, just as they do in the upper world... "But why this elaborate duplication of the terrestrial heavens?” inquired Buell. "Our priests are both astronomers and astrologers. They could not properly conduct their holy offices without making their daily and nightly observations. |
| Technovelgy from The Bride of Osirus,
by Otis Adelbert Kline. Published by Weird Tales in 1927 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the reflected artificial sun from Revolt on Inferno (1931) by Victor Rousseau, the orbital mirror from Completely Automatic (1941) by Theodore Sturgeon and the Lado-Acheson system from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson.
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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!'
