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"What I have in my stories is ethics. Ethics and morality are very different cups of tea. I adhere to a very strict rigor of personal ethics and I demand it of those around me as well."
- Harlan Ellison
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| Steel Crocodile | ||
| A boat specialized for swamps on Venus. |
Heinlein has a lot of fun here, designing a swamp boat for another planet.
| Wingate followed him out into warm winter drizzle to the parking lot, where steel crocodiles were drawn up in parallel rows. Van Huysen paused beside a thirty-foot Remington. “Get in.”
The long boxlike body of the crock was stowed to its load line with supplies Van Huysen had purchased at the base. Sprawled on the tarpaulin which covered the cargo were half a dozen men... The man designated gave Wingate a bright nod and moved forward into the operator’s seat. At a wave from Van Huysen, who had seated his bulk in the little sheltered cabin aft, he pulled back on both control levers and the crocodile crawled away, its caterpillar treads clanking and chunking through the mud... Shortly after leaving the outskirts of Adonis, the car slithered down a sloping piece of ground, teetered over a low bank, and splashed loggily into water...
 (Steel Crocodile from 'Logic of Empire' by Robert Heinlein) He had his hands full; the marsh they were traversing looked like solid ground, so heavily was it overgrown with rank vegetation. The crocodile now functioned as a boat, the broad flanges of the treads acting as paddle wheels. The wedge-shaped prow pushed shrubs and marsh grass aside, or struck and ground down small trees. Occasionally the lugs would bite into the mud of a shoal bottom, and, crawling over a bar, return temporarily to the status of a land vehicle...
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| Technovelgy from Logic of Empire,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
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Compare to the ships with legs from Buck Rogers: 2430 AD (1929) by Nowlan and Calkin, the metal monster from The Doom from Planet 4 (1931) by Jack Williamson, the centipede-machine from Monsters of Mars (1931) by Edmond Hamilton, the walker wagon from Farmer in the Sky (1950) by Robert Heinlein, the robass from The Quest for Saint Aquin (1951) by Anthony Boucher, the walking mill from Bread Overhead! (1958) by Fritz Leiber, the centipede from Killing Titan (2015) by Greg Bear and the walking fort from The Killing Machine (1964) by Jack Vance.
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'The peculiar quality of this light, which gave it its great preeminence over all other penetrating rays...'
'The overworked leg motor would have to cool down before he could work on it...'
‘Where to, sport?’ the starter at cab relay asked.
This is nothing new for science fiction fans!
'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
