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"I've got this beautiful panoramic three-dimensional painting of Mars based on Martian photos. It's 30 feet wide. You can pick out every pebble on the Martian landscape. And who'd have dreamed you could do that?"
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Aircab | ||
| A flying autonomous taxi cab. |
As far as I know, the first use of this word in science fiction.
| Dropping his aircab from the night traffic level and hovering over the place at dawn, Peyton could see nothing about it to justify the fears of his companion. |
| Technovelgy from The Barrier,
by Harl Vincent. Published by Amazing Stories in 1934 Additional resources -
|
H. Beam Piper also used this in Time Crime:
"Which landing stage, please?"
Vall leaned forward and punched at the buttons in front of him. Something in the cab's electronic brain gave a rapid series of clicks as it shifted from the general Paratime Building beam to the beam of the Paratime Police landing stage, then it said, "Thank you."
The building below seemed to rotate upward toward them as it settled down. Then the antigrav-field snapped off, the cab door popped open, and the cab said: "Good-by, now. Ride with me again, sometime."
Compare to the tin cabby from the 1957 novel Cities in Flight by James Blish and to the automatic automobile from David H. Keller's 1935 story The Living Machine.
The music that the cab had been playing died away. "Paratime Building, just below," it said, in a light feminine voice.
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| Futuristic Transit Elevated Bus Never Really Worked |
| Japan Automated Cargo Transport |
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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'
