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"I don't have an e-mail address. As much as I admire the Internet I suffer literally agoraphobia, which in it's original sense means a fear of the marketplace. I do not want to receive three hundred e-mail messages per week from strangers…"
- William Gibson
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| Bat Wings | ||
| The dream of human-powered winged flight becomes a reality - in low gravity, of course. |
In this excerpt from the novel, the inhabitants of an orbiting habitat take time for recreation.
| There were wings attached to hooks at the entrance. McLeve took down a set and began strapping them on. Black bat wings. They made him look like a fallen angel, Milton's style. He handed me another pair. "Like to fly?" he asked... I was a tiny chick in a vast eggshell. The landscape was wrapped around me: fields and houses... Every direction was down. |
| Technovelgy from Limits,
by Larry Niven. Published by Del Rey in 1985 Additional resources -
|
This is from Spirals a short story by Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
Hang gliding is a similar sport; it gained popularity in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Hang gliding is based on a technology developed in 1948 called the "parawing", a
V-shaped flexible airfoil made of fabric. NASA showed early interest in using it for returning space craft.
As alert readers have pointed out, Robert Heinlein originated this idea almost thirty years earlier in The Menace From Earth - see the entry for Bat's Wings. For a different take on this idea, see the Dragonfly sky-bike from Rendezvous With Rama (1972) by Arthur C. Clarke.
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'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
'...the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and Then one toppled and fell. Then another.'
'Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space...'
'The men are dead, but their acquired wisdom lives on and I am the beneficiary.'
'Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting.'
'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
