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"[Science fiction] is the one literary medium left in which we have a free hand. We can do any damn thing we please."
- Alfred Bester
 |
| Slug | ||
| An underwater "barge", consisting of a giant tube for transporting oil. |
| In the cold Arctic waters outside the Ram, pumps turned, hose nozzles sought out bottom muck for ballast. The plastic slug began to swell with its cargo of oil -- like a live thing drinking at a jugular in the earth.
The hands of the timelog swept around, around. Fifty-one hours at the well. Full slug. It stretched out on the bottom behind the Ram, turgid with its cargo, now almost a mile long, held in delicate hydrostatic balance so that it would tow beneath the surface. |
| Technovelgy from Dragon in the Sea,
by Frank Herbert. Published by Doubleday in 1956 Additional resources -
|
Apparently, in 1958 the British Dunlop company began to produce and sell the "slug" barge idea as the "Dracone Barge". Both Arthur C. Clarke and Fritz Leiber recommended that Herbert take legal action, but he found that there is a two-year discovery period that lapsed after the publication of his book, so it was too late to file.
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'If the biological robots were not living creatures, they were certainly very good imitations.'
"Everybody and his dog, it seemed, wanted to live out in the country; transportation and communication were no longer isolating factors."
'... the new typewriter that could be talked to, and which transposed the spoken sound into typed words.'
'... underneath they consisted of networks of cooling tubes against the skin.'
'My cars talk to one another. I have no doubt about it...'
'... the imprint of her image on the telephoto cell.'
