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"Cyberpunk worked when the Internet was in its hand-wound crystal radio phase, when you had to be a sort of hobbyist to do e-mail, and it all had a very steep learning curve. Those days are over."
- William Gibson
 |
| Attractive Ray | ||
| A beam of radiation that pulls. |
This is a very early reference to what sci-fi fans have come to refer to as the "tractor beam." The term tractor beam occurs first in E.E "Doc" Smith's Spacehounds of IPC three years later.
| A spark of intense white light had suddenly broken into being on the platform beneath us, a beam of blinding light that sabbed straight up toward us, bathing the cruiser in its unearthly glow. And suddenly our ship was falling!
Sarto Sen sprang to the controls wrenched around the power-lever. "That ray!" he cried. "It's attractive! - it's pulling us down!" Our ship was vibrating now to the full force of its generators, but still we were falling... |
| Technovelgy from Crashing Suns,
by Edmond Hamilton. Published by Popular Fiction Publishing Co. in 1928 Additional resources -
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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...'
