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"The world is really so surreal these days that it's necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. The artist functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are."
- William Gibson
 |
| Transparent Spherical Ship | ||
| A huge sphere of quartz housing a platform for space use. |
| Bulking in the firmament ahead, now appeared the Thing they had sped to combat, the vast transparent shell of the Emperor of the Stars. A huge hollow sphere it was, almost a thousand feet across, of fused, clear quartz, the walls tremendously thick!
In the center of the great hollow floated a disk that almost reached across the globe. On it appeared a hive of great machines and apparatus. Giant pistons slid back and forth, huge vacuum tubes glowed with electronic discharges, motors and dynamos were surging with power...
 (The Emperor of the Stars) |
| Technovelgy from The Emperor of the Stars,
by Nat Schachner (w. AL Zagat). Published by Wonder Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
This is a striking image; I think that Larry Niven's General Products hull from his 1970 novel Ringworld is pretty much a duplicate of this idea (the #4 hull is a thousand foot sphere). See also the space laboratory from Schachner's Crystalized Thought (1937).
The same idea is used in Cosmic Steeplechase, a 1932 story published in Wonder Stories, by science fiction writer Robert A. Wait:
Jameson and the rest who went out on the hull waved and signalled every type of code they thought might even be noticed by the occupants of the strange ship. As no doors or windows showed on the hull of the sphere, the earth men assumed that the hull of the ship must be transparent, at least from within.
The configuration, which is a spherical platform that appears to be suspended in space, will also remind sf readers of the space-going towns in Cities in Flight, the James Blish novels of the late 1950's. Instead of using a material sphere, Blish created the idea of a spindizzy, which created a force-field as well as anti-gravity.
The newcomer was built in the form of a sphere and had no ports or windows visible. It was made of what looked like a glass with all the visual qualities of some of earth's white metals. Several of the scientists at once decided it must be made of a transparent metal of some sort or else a specially hardened and colored glass.
('Cosmic Steeplechase' by Robert A. Wait)
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Tech news articles related to works by Nat Schachner (w. AL Zagat)
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'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
'The area affected was five hundred kilometres across, and perfectly circular.'
'Hasan always pitched a Gauzy - a one-molecule-layer tent, opaque, feather-light, and very tough.'
'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
