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"Science and science fiction, how do you even distinguish the two?"
- Jerry Pournelle
 |
| Sun Boat | ||
| A device to manipulate energy emitted by the sun, to direct the weather of the Earth. |
| For a while it looked
like Andrews would get credit for inventing the sessile boats, but he was
finally beaten by Hans Daggensnurf.
There used to be a few people around
who insisted that Andrews was the
real inventor all along, and that dirty
politics, shrewd lawyers, unethical
corporations, and filthy money combined to make a goat out of him. The
name 'sessile boats' was Andrews'
name for the sun boats, and the name
has stuck. But then, you could never
have called them Daggensnurf boats."
Wilburn remembered now, awed
that his subconscious mind should
have somehow alerted him to the eed to check out the name George
Andrews.
 (Sun boat from 'The Weather Man' by Theodore Thomas.) Andrews had been the George Seldon of the automobile industry, the William Kelly of the socalled Bessemer steel process. All were forgotten men; someone else reaped the immortality. In Andrews' case, he had, according to some, been the man who invented the sun boats, those marvelous devices that made the entire Weather Congress possible. Sliding on a thin film of gaseous carbon, the sessile boats safely traversed the hell of the sun's surface, moving from place to place to stir up the activity needed to produce the desired weather. Without the sessile boats there would be no Weather Bureau staffed by lean, hard-eyed men, working the sun to produce the results called for by the Weather Council. |
| Technovelgy from The Weather Man,
by Theodore L Thomas. Published by Analog in 1961 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the aeriduct from A Journey In Other Worlds (1894) by John Jacob Astor IV, the weather integrators from Methuselah's Children (1941) by Robert Heinlein, atmosphere control from The Mote in God's Eye (1974) by Larry Niven (w/J. Pournelle) and Pina2bo from Termination Shock (2021) by Neal Stephenson.
Thanks to Bruce P for the tip on this item and story.
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