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"As a writer, I don't want to chew my cud. I don't want to have to spit out and regurgitate the same stuff again."
- Harlan Ellison
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| Bat Wings | ||
| The dream of human-powered winged flight becomes a reality - in low gravity, of course. |
In this excerpt from the novel, the inhabitants of an orbiting habitat take time for recreation.
| There were wings attached to hooks at the entrance. McLeve took down a set and began strapping them on. Black bat wings. They made him look like a fallen angel, Milton's style. He handed me another pair. "Like to fly?" he asked... I was a tiny chick in a vast eggshell. The landscape was wrapped around me: fields and houses... Every direction was down. |
| Technovelgy from Limits,
by Larry Niven. Published by Del Rey in 1985 Additional resources -
|
This is from Spirals a short story by Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
Hang gliding is a similar sport; it gained popularity in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Hang gliding is based on a technology developed in 1948 called the "parawing", a
V-shaped flexible airfoil made of fabric. NASA showed early interest in using it for returning space craft.
As alert readers have pointed out, Robert Heinlein originated this idea almost thirty years earlier in The Menace From Earth - see the entry for Bat's Wings. For a different take on this idea, see the Dragonfly sky-bike from Rendezvous With Rama (1972) by Arthur C. Clarke.
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
