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"This is a predictive tool I've used: There are goals we've sought for ten thousand years, and we'll go on seeking them. Instant transport and travel, immortality (or at least longevity and miracle cures.), instant learning …"
- Larry Niven
 |
| Magnetic Anchor | ||
| A means of affixing an anchor point on a spacecraft hull. |
| ...a heavy magnetic anchor leaped from its catapult toward the passing ship, dragging its cable. It struck the liner's hull, clung fast. Like a silver fish, the Bellatrix plunged and darted for a time upon the line. But the smaller station held her adroitly, giving her opportunity neither to ram nor to break the cable. And steadily the ships were drawn together as the cable was wound upon its drum. The purple, fluorescent blast from the liner's motors was at last shut off. The two ships drifted side by side, at the cable's ends — hurtling down toward the black, red-flecked disk of the Dead Star... Five minutes later, the eleven of us were dragging ourselves across between the ships in clumsy, inflated suits, laden with weapons. As weird a journey as can be imagined, it was. Eleven swollen giants, climbing by their hands along a cable between two vessels in the void. For background, the flaming streamers of the Great Nebula, and the malign black disk of the Dead Star. |
| Technovelgy from Dead Star Station,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1933 Additional resources -
|
Here's another quote from The Saga of Pelican West (1937) by Eric Frank Russell:
“There’s little to tell.” She shrugged
and gazed pensively into the distance.
“I was official hostess on board the Ongortolla. When we were five days off
Great Plains, our ship was pirated by
Jason Kemp and his gang of toughs,
and -“
“Kemp, eh?” he interrupted.
“Yes. He swept alongside us,
clamped on with magnetic anchors,
forced the air lock and placed a prize
crew aboard. The Ongortolla hung in
space until Mars had swung clear, then
made for the asteroid belt.”
Compare to the magnetic grapple-beams from Solar Lottery (1955) by Philip K. Dick and the magnapoon from Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson.
“NOW tell me what happened,” Pelican encouraged.
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| The First Space Warship For Space Force |
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'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain...'
'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.'
'I ... set my automatic astronomical instruments to searching for a habitable planet.'
'...haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?'
