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"Bureaucracies hide their mistakes, because people's careers are tied to those mistakes. Therefore, bureaucracies are a perfect mechanism for perpetuating mistakes."
- Frank Herbert
 |
| Sand-Yacht (Land Schooner) | ||
| A vehicle that used wind power upon its sails to move on the land. |
Ballard uses the similarities between the sea and vast desert sands to great effect in this story.
| Every summer during the season at Vermillion Sands, when the town was full of tourists and avant-garde film companies, I would close my office and take one of the beach-houses by the sand-sea five miles away at Ciraquito. Here the long evenings made brilliant sunsets of the sky and desert, crossing the sails of the sand-yachts with hieroglyphic shadows, signatures of all the strange ciphers of the desert sea. During the day I would take my yacht, a Bermuda-rigged sloop, and sail toward the dunes of the open desert. The strong thermals swept me along on a wake of gilded sand. |
| Technovelgy from Cry Hope, Cry Fury!,
by J.G. Ballard. Published by Mercury Publications, Inc. in 1966 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the Sand Ship from Ray Bradbury's 1950 story collection Martian Chronicles.
How old is the tradition of land sailing? I have no idea, but I'm sure it predates Ballard's reference. Here is a picture of some land sailors in the UK enjoying a sail next to the sea.
(Land sailing in the UK)
There is a tradition of land sailing in the United States from the 1960's. The yachts appear to be very similar to ice boats, except that they use wheels instead of blades. I did ice boating in the 1960's; you can really build up some speed on a reach.
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'The observation vehicle was of that peculiar variety used in conveying a large number of people across rough terrain.'
'The real border was defended by... a swarm of quasi-independent aerostats.'
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'...haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?'
'... oblongs were all over the floor and surfaces.'
