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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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| Shipstone | ||
| A lot of power in a small, manufactured package. |
| The Shipstone complex is mammoth, all right, because they supply cheap power to billions of people who want cheap power and want more of it every year. But it is not a monopoly because they don't own any power; they just package it and ship it around to wherever people want it... |
| Technovelgy from Friday,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Holt, Rhinehart and Winston in 1982 Additional resources -
|
In the story, Shipstones come in various sizes, some large enough to power ocean freighters and even spaceships. Others are smaller, intended to power a home or even a small tool, like a drill.
So whip out your pocket torch, Friday, powered with its own tiny lifetime Shipstone, and search.
Compare to the solid power from Revolt on the Tenth World (1940) by Edmond Hamilton and the kink springs from The Calorie Man (2005), by Paolo Bacigalupi.
...the place was dark as ink...
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- EEStor Ultracapacitor 'Battery' And Heinlein's Shipstone
- Betavoltaic Battery: 30 Years Of Power
- Hyperion Power Module Neighborhood Nuclear Reactor
- Bloom Box Brick Powers Your Home
- Russia's Self-Contained Nuclear Lighthouses
- Nuclear Batteries Based On Diamonds Last Millennia
| The Zapata Air Scooter Would Be Great In A Science Fiction Story |
| Could Crystal Batteries Generate Power For Centuries? |
| Replace The Smartphone With A Connected Edge Node For AI Inference |
| Sunday Robotics 'Memo' Bot Has Unique Training Glove |
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
