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"But the problem with reincarnation is that it's hard to imagine what the storage medium for past lives would be. Not to mention the input-output device. I hesitate to rule it out completely, but I'd need pretty definite proof."
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Sargasso Asteroid | ||
| A planetoid built from natural rock and the salvaged wreckage of space craft. |
In the twenty-fourth century, only one truly primitive society still exists - The Scientific People. They were descendants of a research team of scientists that had been lost and marooned in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter two hundred years previously.
Gulliver Foyle, last man alive aboard the space ship Nomad, was taken alive by The Scientific People, his ship to be added to their little world.
| He awoke once while he was being carried in triumph on a litter through the natural and artificial passages within the scavenger asteroid. They were constructed of meteor metal, stone and hull plates... The passages led to great halls, storerooms, apartments and homes, all built of salvaged ships cemented into the asteroid.
In rapid succession, Foyle was borne through an ancient Ganymede scow, a Lassell ice borer, a captain's barge, a Calisto heavy cruiser, a twenty-second-century fuel transport with glass tanks still filled with smoky rocket fuel... |
| Technovelgy from The Stars My Destination,
by Alfred Bester. Published by Berkley in 1956 Additional resources -
|
The Scientific people practiced a "barbaric travesty of the scientific method they remembered from their forebears." Their leader greets Foyle by saying
"Quant suff.!" the crowd bellowed.
Compare the Sargasso Asteroid with the wreck-pack from Edmond Hamilton's 1931 story The Sargasso of Space.
As a space station, compare to the brick moon from The Brick Moon (1869) by Edward Everett Hale, the city of space from The Prince of Space (1931) by Jack Williamson, the New Moon Casino from One Against the Legion (1939) by Jack Williamson, the asteroid space station from Misfit (1939) by Robert Heinlein, the Venus Equilateral Relay Station from QRM - Interplanetary (1942) by George O. Smith, Wheelchair from Waldo (1942) by Robert Heinlein, the space transfer station from Between Planets (1951) by Robert Heinlein, the tether space station from Tank Farm Dynamo (1983) by David Brin and the high orbit archipelago from Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) by William Gibson.
"You are the first to arrive alive in fifty years. You are a puissant man. Arrival of the fittest is the doctrine of Holy Darwin. Most scientific."
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Stars My Destination
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Tech news articles related to works by Alfred Bester
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| Used Dragon Cargo Spacecraft Will Fly Again |
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'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors...'
'The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
