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"The permanent government now is the anchorpeople. They don't get elected, and year after year they're responding emotionally to this or that."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Sun-Quilt | ||
| A colorful fabric with a silvered backing used to shield the interior of a living-globe from excessive sunlight. |
| Attached to the Beat Cluster by two somewhat larger sealingsilk tunnels and blocking off a good eighth of the inky, star-speckled sky, was the vast trim aluminum bulk of Research Satellite One, dazzling now in the untempered sunlight.
It was mostly this sunlight reflected by the parent satellite, however, that now illuminated Fats Jordan and the other “floaters” of the Beat Cluster. A huge sun-quilt was untidily spread (staying approximately where it was put, like all objects in freefall) against most of the inside of the Big Igloo away from the satellite. The sun-quilt was a patchwork of colors and materials on the inward side, but silvered on the outward side, as turned-over edges and corners showed. Similar “Hollywood Blankets” protected the other igloos from the undesirable heating effects of too much sunlight and, of course, blocked off the sun’s disk from view. |
| Technovelgy from The Beat Cluster,
by Fritz Leiber. Published by Galaxy in 1961 Additional resources -
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and Technology from The Beat Cluster
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Tech news articles related to The Beat Cluster
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Sun-Quilt-related
news articles:
- Space Station Shutters
| Beautiful Visualization of Dawn Spacecraft |
| Tumblin' Tumbleweed Rovers To Eplore Mars |
| Tentacled Robot Captures Space Debris |
| Reflect Orbital Sunlight On Demand |
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'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
