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"The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. You look at the world around you, and take it apart into its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Energy Converter | ||
| Massive unit on the sunside of Mercury converts heat into energy, and beams it around the solar system. |
| "Cheap energy; cheapest in the System. Sun power, you know, and on Mercury's Sunside, sunpower is something. That's why the Station was built in the sunlight rather than in the shadow of a mountain. It's really a huge energy converter. The heat is turned into electricity, light mechanical work and what have you; so that energy is supplied and the Station is cooled in a simultaneous process." |
| Technovelgy from Runaround,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Street and Smith in 1942 Additional resources -
|
The energy is beamed around the solar system; this is described more fully in succeeding stories the I, Robot series.
Compare to the Near-Space Solar Energy Collectors from Olaf Stapledon's 1937 novel Star Maker. and the solar energy beam from Masquerade by Clifford Simak.
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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.'
