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"Science and science fiction, how do you even distinguish the two?"
- Jerry Pournelle
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| Stationmaster | ||
| A human being is preserved for life in space, serving as the conscious mind running a space station. |
George Harmon was the stationmaster, but it was more than a job.
| The first years had been the hardest, trying to adjust to giving up human qualities to become a space station. Often during that time he had gazed in upon himself, upon his human body, and wondered if the pension given to Stationmasters was worth the years of isolation. He had examined his apparently Ufeless body encased in its plastic cylinder of preserving, protecting liquid carefully traced the spiderweb wires fastened by surgery which plunged from all directions into his brain toward predetermined contacts. The wires stretched through the space station like veins and arteries and nerves, making the station a living thing.
 ('Many Dreams of Earth' by Charles E. Fritch) They had plugged him, like some great electronic tube, into the hub of the station, and from that moment on he had ceased to exist. From that instant he ceased to be George Harmon, Earthling, homo sapiens. From that moment on he was Space Station 42, a mechanical entity patrolling an orbit between Earth and Mars — on a ten year tour of duty. |
| Technovelgy from Many Dreams of Earth,
by Charles E. Fritch. Published by Orbit in 1954 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the living space ship from Solar Plexus (1941) by James Blish.
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More Ideas
and Technology from Many Dreams of Earth
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Tech news articles related to Many Dreams of Earth
Tech news articles related to works by Charles E. Fritch
| Beautiful Visualization of Dawn Spacecraft |
| Tumblin' Tumbleweed Rovers To Eplore Mars |
| Tentacled Robot Captures Space Debris |
| Reflect Orbital Sunlight On Demand |
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Science Fiction
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'So, Ender, we will now begin your education.'
'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
