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"it slowly dawned on me that the landscape of science is maybe what interests people a great deal in science fiction."
- Gregory Benford
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| Solenoid Wickets | ||
| Great hoops of metal that guided, held and then shot ships into space. |
I think I'm interpreting the author correctly; electromagnetic forces are used to move ships around, hold them in place, and then propel them into space.
| They emerged in shadow, hugging the wall. Almost a quarter of a mile to the right the megalith of the Communications Tower, crowned with many lights where the signal-men sat godlike in its summit. Its floodlights shed a vast oval of light out over the mesa, where the mile-long runways — no longer polished mirror-like as in the days of Dynamopolis’ glory — stretched away into the darkness of the table land. A handful of odd ships — mere remnant of the hundreds that Pi Mesa port had berthed — huddled under the solenoid wickets, as if driven together by the chill of the thin, knife-like wind that blew across the mesa.
As the two paced slowly across the runways, Ryd had a sense of protective isolation in the vast impersonality of the spaceport. Surely, in this Titanic desolation of metal slabs and flat-roofed buildings, dominated by the one great tower, total insignificance must mean safety for them... And out on the steel-stripped tarmac, under the solenoid of Number Two Runway, lay a towship, backed like a stegosaur with its massive magnets — the Shahrazad, panting like a dragon amid rolling clouds of steam. She was plainly ready to go into space... The Martian warship lay there beyond the solenoid, a spiteful hundred-foot swordfish of steel, with blind gunvalves, row on row, along its sleek sides and turret-blisters. It had not yet been tugged onto the turntable ; it could not be leaving again very soon, though Earth weight was undoubtedly incommoding its crew... The guard turned and swung briskly off to intercept the oddly-behaving pair, hand crowding the butt of his pistol, for he was growing uneasy. His alarm mounted rapidly, till he nearly sprained an ankle in sprinting across the last of the two intervening runways, between the solenoid wickets. Those metal arches, crowding one on the other in perspective, formed a tunnel that effectively shielded the Shahrazad’ s airlocks from more distant view ; the gang of notables attracted by the occasion was already being shepherded back to safety by the Communications guards, whose attention was thus well taken up... |
| Technovelgy from Saboteur of Space,
by Robert Abernathy. Published by Planet Stories in 1944 Additional resources -
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'It sounds to me as though you had invented a kind of metal earthworm.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors that circulate around the satellite, making it habitable.'
'The steel tortoise gave MacKinnon a feeling of Crusoe- like independence.'
'...then back to their work, though little enough it was on these automatic cultivators.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
