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"I don't know why I write science fiction. The voices in my head told me to!"
- Charles Stross
 |
| Multispecies Hotel | ||
| A hotel set up to serve beings from different planets. |
This is an early use of this idea.
| Its name, flashing in
brilliant lights at night, was Hotel Cosmos. Within its walls lay a haven for every kind of intelligent extra-terrestrial creature who dared to cross the interplanetary and interstellar distances to the alien Earth. Few of those beings could have survived raw Earthly conditions for much more than a minute.
When you banded together in one building beings of hundreds of diverse forms and backgrounds, and of as many widely separated conceptions of what is just and what is not, automatically you formed a brew that had most of the ticklish danger of a charge of hyper-dynamium explosive... The aspect of all the corridors of the building was much the same. Their floors were heavily carpeted; the walls, of tooled metal, were dully shining in the subdued green glow of the lights. Their uniformity was broken at regular intervals by airtight circular doors, which resembled in a somewhat less massive form the portals of bank vaults. Each door displayed a number, wrought in black onyx inlay, and mounted on each were several small valve-wheels for regulating and adjusting the temperature, pressure, and gaseous composition of the atmosphere of the room within. |
| Technovelgy from Hotel Cosmos,
by Raymond Z. Gallun. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1938 Additional resources -
|
Everyone is familiar with the cantina bar scene in Star Wars (1977), showing a familiar location with unfamiliar guests.
Fans of Larry Niven recall the Draco Tavern stories.
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Tech news articles related to Hotel Cosmos
Tech news articles related to works by Raymond Z. Gallun
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| LiquidView Ersatz Windows, ala Philip K. Dick |
| Solar House Concept Unfolds Solar Panels Like A Flower |
| San Fran's Tiny Homeless |
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
