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"I received a nice letter the other day from the Dalai Lama. He had read 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. It is about a computer at a Tibetan monastery."
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Surface Slider | ||
| A small, lightweight craft. |
| "Gersen hired a car, a small surface slider, and skidded south over the broad white turnpike, the inevitable dust puffing up behind him." |
| Technovelgy from The Star King,
by Jack Vance. Published by Berkeley in 1964 Additional resources -
|
This is a widely used idea in sf. Compare to the skimmer from Roger Zelazny's 1966 novel This Immortal and the landspeeder from George Lucas' 1978 novel Star Wars.
Thanks to the anonymous reader who provided the quote for this item in comments!
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Star King
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and Technology by Jack Vance
Tech news articles related to The Star King
Tech news articles related to works by Jack Vance
| Inmotion Electric Unicycle In Combat |
| Congress Considers Automatic Emergency Braking, One Hundred Years Too Late |
| The 'Last Mile' In China Crowded With Delivery Robots |
| Musk Idea Of Cars Talking To Each Other Predicted 70 Years Ago |
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'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
'The greatest problem of all was the elimination of the human element of braking together with its inevitable time lag.'
'Across the ancient sea floor a dozen tall, blue-sailed Martian sand ships floated, like blue smoke.'
'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
