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"If we're going to be consistent and advocate freedom of speech we have to advocate freedom of encrypted speech too. The genie is out of the bottle, cryptologically."
- Neal Stephenson
 |
| Sargasso Asteroid | ||
| A planetoid built from natural rock and the salvaged wreckage of space craft. |
In the twenty-fourth century, only one truly primitive society still exists - The Scientific People. They were descendants of a research team of scientists that had been lost and marooned in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter two hundred years previously.
Gulliver Foyle, last man alive aboard the space ship Nomad, was taken alive by The Scientific People, his ship to be added to their little world.
| He awoke once while he was being carried in triumph on a litter through the natural and artificial passages within the scavenger asteroid. They were constructed of meteor metal, stone and hull plates... The passages led to great halls, storerooms, apartments and homes, all built of salvaged ships cemented into the asteroid.
In rapid succession, Foyle was borne through an ancient Ganymede scow, a Lassell ice borer, a captain's barge, a Calisto heavy cruiser, a twenty-second-century fuel transport with glass tanks still filled with smoky rocket fuel... |
| From The Stars My Destination,
by Alfred Bester. Published by Berkley in 1956 Additional resources -
|
The Scientific people practiced a "barbaric travesty of the scientific method they remembered from their forebears." Their leader greets Foyle by saying
"Quant suff.!" the crowd bellowed.
Compare the Sargasso Asteroid with the wreck-pack from Edmond Hamilton's 1931 story The Sargasso of Space.
"You are the first to arrive alive in fifty years. You are a puissant man. Arrival of the fittest is the doctrine of Holy Darwin. Most scientific."
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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'But when Old Father Sun departs, the chromoplastic reverts to transparency in the dark.'
'It extended three of its tiny arms sideways to lock onto the registration pins...'
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'Mass-produced in the orbiting factories...'
'I enjoy watching this way, but - He waved his hand and the circuit switched abruptly.'
SF writers popularized and elaborated on this idea a generation before the first patents were filed.
'The autopilot would need data before it could begin a translation...'
'Sealed to the ground along all the sides, Honey, he growled...'
