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"If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Mail-Post Letter-Ball | ||
| A system of sending mail quickly from town to town via steam-cannon-powered hollow spheres. |
| In those days, the ancient method of conveying the post having been found much too slow for so enlightened a people, an ingenious scheme had been devices, by which the letters were put into balls and discharged by steam-cannon, from place to place; every town and district having a piece of toile melalique or woven wire, suspended in the air so as to form a kind of net to arrest the progress of the ball, and being provided with a cannon to send it off again, when the letters belonging to that neighborhood should have been extracted: whilst, to prevent accident, the mail-post letter-balls were always preceded by one of similar description, made of thin wood, with a hole in its side, which, collecting the wind as it passed along, made a kind of whistling noise, to admonish people to keep out of the way. |
| Technovelgy from The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century,
by Jane Webb Loudon. Published by Not known in 1828 Additional resources -
|
I enjoyed the juxtaposition of this extraordinary application of technology with the existence of carrier pigeons, which are also mentioned in the story.
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'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
'Briquet’s head seemed to think that to find and attach a new body to her head was as easy as to fit and sew a new dress.'
'...copy was turned out in a charming and entirely feminine handwriting.'
'It was almost unheard of for slunch to spread that fast...'
'He then started hand movements of definite pattern...'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain...'
