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"It was my preferred entertainment when I was a kid, so when I set out to be a writer, it was perfectly natural that I should write the sort of stories that I used to enjoy reading."
- John Brunner
 |
| Power-skis | ||
| Just the accoutrement for exploration, depending on the world. |
| JOAN strapped on her power-skis and straightened up. Behind her Dome Kappa gleamed in the milky sunshine, a great bubble reflecting the feeble sunshine and the white, cloud-furrowed sky. In front of her her husband stood erect on a low hill, impermasuit shining silver, heat-gun slung over his shoulder, a tall, gallant figure facing the sinister desolation of an untamed planet . . . “Damn showoff” Joan growled, skiing laboriously toward him.
“What?” said a polite, arrogant voice in her earpiece. She had forgotten they were hooked up. “I said let’s be off.”
 (Power Skis from 'Selection' by Ursula K. Le Guin) “Right!” he said, and vanished. He had grown up in Dome Beta, near the so-called Alps, where they did a lot of skiing just for pleasure. Jaw set, teeth locked, Joan labored after him, her skis constantly trying to shoot out from under her and raising all around her great clouds of bacterial dust, through which she now and then saw his bright figure skimming on ahead. |
| Technovelgy from Selection,
by Ursula Le Guin. Published by Amazing Stories in 1964 Additional resources -
|
She continues:
But there he was, not fifteen feet from her. She circled back, cut her ski-power, and bent over him. He lay sprawled head downward on a slope, and she could make out in the dark grey twilight what had spilled him : coming over the crest of the slope he had skied down onto a stretch of naked rock, where a big patch of one of the virulent native phages had cleared away all other life and then died of starvation, leaving a few meters bare of snow for a day or two.
Compare to moon skis from Requiem (1940) by Robert Heinlein.
Heinlein also used skis in this 1949 story, published in Boys Life.
And he veered off to the right, executing a few fancy slaloms down a slope, and zoomed on till he was hardly more than a shiny dot describing a larger orbit in the distance. Free at last of the pressure of his constant presence, Joan skied on in a kind of visually alert doze. Slowly the afternoon darkened. Even a thirty-hour day sinks to evening at last. She began to feel hungry, and wondered when he would suggest they return to the bubble. But he said nothing. He wanted her to admit she was tired first. Damned if she would I She went on, drugged by the rhythm of the power-skis. Lights in Dome Kappa shone golden...
(Moonskis in 'Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon' by Robert Heinlein)
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More Ideas
and Technology from Selection
More Ideas
and Technology by Ursula Le Guin
Tech news articles related to Selection
Tech news articles related to works by Ursula Le Guin
Power-skis-related
news articles:
- Vipera Electric Skis From Frigid Dynamics
| Elon Musk Wants Data Centers In Space |
| ISS Plagued By Leak - Again! |
| Sunbird Pulsar Fusion Like Leinster's Space Tug |
| Crystalline Structures In Space, You Say? |
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'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
'I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh.'
'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
