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"This category [science fiction] excludes rocket ships that make U-turns, serpent men of Neptune that lust after human maidens, and stories by authors who flunked their Boy Scout merit badge tests in descriptive astronomy."
- Robert Heinlein
 |
| Electrono-Mirror | ||
| Focuses the sun's rays on a planetary surface for terraforming purposes. |
| Uranus boasted its tiny colonies; Neptune was now being studied for a colonization project. And far Pluto was under constant electrono-mirror bombardment that its icy surface might some day be cleared. |
| Technovelgy from The Day We Celebrate,
by Nelson S. Bond. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the reflecting Artificial sun from Revolt on Inferno (1931) by Victor Rousseau, the synchrophased power beams from Murray Leinster's The Propagandist (1947), the spot light of heat from Niven/Pournelle/Flynn's Fallen Angels (1991) and Clifford Simak's solar energy beam from Masquerade (1941).
For those keeping track, this story was in the January, 1941 issue of Astounding, while Theodore Sturgeon's orbiting mirror was in the February issue, in a clever short story called Completely Automatic.
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Tech news articles related to works by Nelson S. Bond
| Sunbird Pulsar Fusion Like Leinster's Space Tug |
| Crystalline Structures In Space, You Say? |
| Amazing Photonic Crystal Light Sail |
| The New Habitable Zones Include Asimov's Ribbon Worlds |
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'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
'It hurtled on down with inconceivable speed until it was visible as thousands of tiny robot planes...'
'Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera.'
'... folios and tapes and playable discs of platinum alloy.'
'... another corner of his mind began to think about the shields.'
