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"Does it open a new horizon for my thinking? Does it lead me to think new kinds of thoughts, that I would not otherwise perhaps have thought at all? These qualities are what [make] science fiction ...unique."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Emergency Lifeboat | ||
| A small craft used as a bail-out vehicle from a large space station or spacecraft. |
| Then, each grasping Clio by an arm, the two officers shoved mightily with their feet, and the three armored forms darted away toward their only hope of escape - an emergency lifeboat that could be launched through the shell of the great globe. To attempt to reach the Hyperion and to escape in one of her lifeboats would have been useless; they could not have forced the great gates of the main airlocks and no other exits existed. |
| Technovelgy from Triplanetary,
by E.E. 'Doc' Smith. Published by Not known in 1934 Additional resources -
|
There are other, earlier references in sf to a "lifeship" that serves this same purpose. In 1946, John MacDougal wrote about it in "Chaos, Coordinated"; there is an even earlier mention in 1940, from Harry Walton's "Moon of Exile".
Take a look at Larry Niven's crash web to protect yourself from deceleration trauma.
Compare to the escapecraft from The Ethical Equations (1945) by Murray Leinster, the
emergency space-boat from Revolt of the Star Men (1932) by Raymond Z. Gallun, the escape pod from Star Wars (1976) by George Lucas, the survival bubble from Footfall (1985) by Niven & Pournelle, the life tubes from Salvage in Space (1933) by Jack Williamson and the life ship from The Invisible World by Ed Earl Repp.
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| Elon Musk Wants Data Centers In Space |
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'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down...'
'Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence...'
'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
