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"...there's a great affinity between writing poetry and SF."
- Dan Simmons
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| Private Flyer | ||
| A privately-owned air vehicle that used no control surfaces for maneuvering. |
| The ordinary private flyer or aircar had no wings at all, or indeed any visible control surfaces. Even the clumsy rotor blades of the old helicopters had been banished. Yet man had not discovered anti-gravity; only the Overlords possessed that ultimate secret. His aircars were propelled by forces which the Wright brothers would have understood. Jet reaction, used both directly and in the more subtle form of boundary layer control, drove his flyers forward and held them in the air. |
| Technovelgy from Childhood's End,
by Arthur C. Clarke. Published by Not Known in 1953 Additional resources -
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Tech news articles related to Childhood's End
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Private Flyer-related
news articles:
- DEMON UAV Has No Moving Flaps
| Secret Kill Switch Found In Yutong Buses |
| The Desert Ship Sailed In Imagination |
| The Zapata Air Scooter Would Be Great In A Science Fiction Story |
| Could Crystal Batteries Generate Power For Centuries? |
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Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
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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'
