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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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| Artificial Transparent Element | ||
| A substance as strong as metal that you can see through. |
| Windows of an artificial transparent element, scarcely less strong than the metal of the hull, enabled the voyagers to look around them. |
| Technovelgy from Last and First Men,
by Olaf Stapledon. Published by Not known in 1930 Additional resources -
|
This is an obvious precursor to the idea with which all Star Trek fans are familiar, that of "transparent aluminum".
Also, it turns out that the helio-beryllium from Out Around Rigel, a 1931 story by Robert H. Wilson, also has a transparent variant.
Compare to glassite from Brigands of the Moon (1930) by Ray Cummings,
neo-crystal from Master of the Asteroid (1932) by Clark Ashton Smith,
transparent car roof from Sinister Barrier (1939) by Eric Frank Russell,
plani glass from Crystalized Thought (1937) by Nat Schachner,
thermalite from Planet of Eternal Night (1939) by John W. Campbell and slow glass from Light of Other Days (1968) by Bob Shaw.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Last and First Men
More Ideas
and Technology by Olaf Stapledon
Tech news articles related to Last and First Men
Tech news articles related to works by Olaf Stapledon
Artificial Transparent Element-related
news articles:
- Transparent Aluminum Vs. .50-Cal Bullets
- New Glass Tough As Steel
| Harvard Metamaterials Change Structure Instantly |
| Nano-Chainmail 2D Mechanically Interlocked Polymer |
| Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick |
| FlexRAM Liquid Metal RAM And One Particular SF Movie Robot |
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'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
'I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh.'
'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
