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"I don't know why I write science fiction. The voices in my head told me to!"
- Charles Stross
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| Starlight Sail (Light Sail) | ||
| A light sail capable of sailing between solar systems. |
I don't know of an earlier reference to light sails in science fiction.
| "Now this is the way that the foresail works. That sail will be twenty thousand miles at the wide part. It tapers down and the total length will be just under eighty-thousand miles. It will be retracted or extended by small servo-robots. The servo-robots are radio-controlled." |
| Technovelgy from The Lady Who Sailed The Soul,
by Cordwainer Smith. Published by Galaxy in 1960 Additional resources -
|
The pilot lived in a tiny control room; flights lasted an average of forty years. The ship had a string of thousands of adiabatic pods, each containing a passenger.
See the longer discussion of light sails (solar sails) from Jack Vance's Sail 25.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Lady Who Sailed The Soul
More Ideas
and Technology by Cordwainer Smith
Tech news articles related to The Lady Who Sailed The Soul
Tech news articles related to works by Cordwainer Smith
Starlight Sail (Light Sail)-related
news articles:
- Cosmos 1 Sets Solar Sail - Update
- NanoSail-D Solar Wind-Rider
- Ikaros Solar Sail Craft Photo Of Venus
- Bigrating Laser Beam-Riding Light Sail Is Self-Correcting
- Blue Collar AI Goes To Work To Mine Its Own Crypto
- Amazing Photonic Crystal Light Sail
| 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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'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.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
