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"If you have a gut response to a story, you are not responding to something new ..you are really responding to a story you were told when you were six or seven…"
- Samuel R. Delany
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| High Kavalaan Aircar | ||
| Flying SUV equipped with laser weapons. |
I'm really tickled by this one, since it neatly reveals the form and intent of the modern-day sport utility vehicle. This aircar could eat Hummers for lunch.
| He had seen a lot of types of aircars in his travels, but none quite like this one; huge and steel-gray, with curved and muscled triangular wings, it looked almost alive, like a great aerial manta ray fashioned in metal. A small cockpit with four seats was set between the wings, and beneath the wingtips he glimpsed ominous rods.
He looked at Gwen and pointed. "Are those lasers?" ...Gwen laughed. "Get in," she told him. "It is a perfectly fine aircar of High Kavalaan manufacture. They've only recently started turning out their own. It's supposed to look like an animal, the black banshee. A flying predator... very big in their folklore, sort of a totem... Every car built on High Kavalaan has weapons of some sort. The culture demands it..." She threw on the gravity grid suddelnly, touched the stick an dthe aircar wrenched forward and left the ground... |
| Technovelgy from Dying of the Light,
by George RR Martin. Published by Baen in 1977 Additional resources -
|
Compare to air-car from A Matter of Size (1934) by Harry Bates.
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'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
