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"Writing about the future, I have a vested interest in there being a future for me to write about."
- John Brunner
 |
| Vacuum Tractor | ||
| A small transport used on the surface of the moon, in vacuum. |
| He was hardly conscious of speaking aloud. Somewhere in the churning mass was the vacuum tractor in which he had driven from Archimedes...
He spent a minute admiring the construction of the suit that alone stood between him and instant extinction. That led him to think of the marvelous mechanism of the vacuum tractor that had carried him so comfortably — though he had not appreciated it at the time — across the Lunar plain. That, logically, recalled the men who had come with him and now were buried beneath one of Plato’s many landslips. |
| Technovelgy from Moonwalk,
by H.B. Fyfe. Published by Space Science Fiction in 1952 Additional resources -
|
Here are a few other snippets with details:
He started along the series of gentle slopes the tractor had climbed earlier.
"Pretty soon, I’ll cross the tractor trail. I’ll follow it out maybe as far as Pico and wait for them to pick me up..."
Instead of the map they had consulted earlier, they gazed down at the new photographs... Johnny Pierce stood lankily behind Burney’s shoulder, holding a spare magnifying glass and squinting down at the photos... "it is quite clear that they reached the crater,” Burney continued. “These are excellent pictures, and the trail of the tractor treads shows very definitely.”
he would stop the tractor on top of a rise, sometimes, and stand up with one leg thrown around the gear levers to steady him.
Compare to the dust cruiser from A Fall of Moondust (1961) by Arthur C. Clark.
It looked like one of the spare oxygen cylinders that had been carried on top of the tractor...
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| Beautiful Visualization of Dawn Spacecraft |
| Tumblin' Tumbleweed Rovers To Eplore Mars |
| Tentacled Robot Captures Space Debris |
| Reflect Orbital Sunlight On Demand |
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'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
'Then he became aware of a gentle pressure pushing him away from the ship.'
'And now they wre busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on...'
'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down...'
'Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence...'
'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
