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"Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today -- but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Jupiter Mining Shoes | ||
| Specialized footgear for walking on the Great Red Spot. |
| On Earth radium was the rarest of known elements and had to be patiently isolated from tons of uranium residues. But on Jupiter radium existed in a free state in the turgid, semiliquid crust area.
...intrepid Earthman — dredgers and miners — had operated them in ghastly loneliness of spirit in a world where human beings moved with the slowness of exhaustion, incased in protective suits that weighed two hundred pounds, and wearing upon their feet immense shoes that mushroomed on the surface that was neither liquid nor solid, but an amalgam alien to Earth Hamden’s nerves shrieked warnings, protested that it was time to quit. The brief, ten-hour Jovian day was drawing to a close amidst such a plethora of brightness that it seemed to be just beginning. Harnden turned slowly about on his huge flattened shoes, and moved toward the little atmosphere transport which floated in the shadow of the Foam Station a few feet from where he was standing. The turgid substance beneath him was unimaginably queer. The immense surfaces of Hamden’s shoes plopped across it, sinking through the spreading scum from the sprayer, but making only slight depressions, which immediately filled, in the basic substance of the Jeel. By ultimate analysis, it was perhaps more solid than liquid. But it was sufficiently liquid to rear into huge waves, cones and pinnacles of seething menace when the sprayer ceased to function. |
| Technovelgy from Red Storm on Jupiter,
by Frank Belknap Long, Jr.. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1936 Additional resources -
|
This is what it is like to walk on Jupiter's Great Red Spot:
Without Jeel shoes a man would be mired. He would sink in up to his knees, his waist.
His immense shoes left phantasmal tracks of vivid red, tracks that quickly vanished as he moved across the sluggishly streaming, diluent crust...
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'...great rectangular slabs of muscle, slung into a rectangular frame.'
'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.'
