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"We're about 20 minutes away from the point where Clarke's law kicks in and technology becomes indistinguishable from magic."
- Peter Watts
 |
| Flying Saucer | ||
| Spacecraft flown by the androgynes of Titan - under control of the Puppetmasters. |
This was how the Puppetmasters of the novel arrived - using the ships of a tiny race from Titan, one of the moons of Saturn.
| There was fighting going on above and all around us, but there was a curious calm near the saucer itself.
The outlander ship loomed up almost over us, not fifty yards away... It was a discus in shape and of great size; it was tilled slightly toward us, for it had grounded partly on one of the magnificent high-stilted old mansions which line that coast. The ship's canted attitude let us see that the upper surface and what was surely its airlock-a metal hemisphere, a dozen feet across, at the main axis of the ship, where the hub would have been had it been a wheel. This hemisphere was lifted straight out or up from the body of the ship some six or eight feet. I could not see what held it out from the hull but I assumed that there must be a central shaft or piston; it came out like a poppet valve. It was easy to see why the masters of the saucer had not closed up again and taken off from there; the airlock was fouled, held open by a "mud turtle", one of those little amphibious tanks which are at home on the bottom of a harbor or crawling up onto a beach... |
| From The Puppet Masters,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Doubleday in 1951 Additional resources -
|
The term itself was created in 1947, in response to real-world sightings of unidentified objects.
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