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"I'm very taken by mythology. I read it at a very early age and kept on reading it. Before I discovered science fiction I was reading mythology."
- Roger Zelazny
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| Tower of Glass | ||
| An enormous glass tower built to communicate outside the solar system. |
| Simeon Krug's tower now rises 100 meters above the gray-brown tundra of the Canadian Arctic, west of Hudson Bay. At present the tower is merely a glassy stump, hollow, open-topped, sealed from the elements only by a repellor field hovering shieldlike just a few meters above the current work level...
Krug has his androids working three shifts round the clock; when it gets dark, the construction site is lit by millions of reflector plates strung across the sky at a height of one kilometer and powered by the little million-kilowatt fusion generator at the north end of the site. "How high will it be when it's finished?" Quenelle asks. "1500 meters," Krug replies. "A tremendous tower of glass full of machinery that nobody can understand. And then we'll turn it on. And then we'll talk to the stars. |
| Technovelgy from Tower of Glass,
by Robert Silverberg. Published by Gollancz in 1970 Additional resources -
|
The tower uses special bands of refrigerator tape embedded in the surrounding permafrost to stabilize the building and leech away the heat of construction.
Compare to city of glass from The Godmakers (1972) by Frank Herbert,
metalloglass from Buck Rogers, 2430 AD (1929) by Nowlan and Calkins and plani-glass from Crystalized Thought (1937) by Nat Schachner.
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'Space-sickness is one of the most unpleasant sensations that a human being can experience. Not all are subject to it...'
'...I saw a nice black heavy-looking cloud sailing by just now, and I can get the electrical machine out in five minutes to draw it down.'
'From a distance it could resolve the cosmic rays reflected from various substances.'
'The answer to the dumb student's prayer.'
'He had travelled the space-lanes of the solar system for the greater part of his life...'
'The dinner was excellent. It was completely vegetarian — grown in specially prepared gardens in this Moon base...'
'Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.'
'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
