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"The world is really so surreal these days that it's necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. The artist functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are."
- William Gibson
 |
| Thigh Grips | ||
| Special chair feature for space ships undergoing accelerations. |
As far as I know, this is the first use of this phrase and idea.
| ...the vast gravitationless room. Two hundred feet by two hundred feet by six hundred, was the size of the general observatory... And all the walls were floors, and the chairs had thigh-grips in them to hold a man down when he sat, lest he float away from the force of an incautious gesture. |
| Technovelgy from The Power Planet,
by Murray Leinster. Published by Amazing Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Leinster also uses this in his 1953 story Space Tug:
Didn't I see thigh grips on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation? I'm pretty sure I did, in Star Trek III Search for Spock (1984):
Brown sat in a fastened-down chair with thigh grips holding him in place.
He was writing. On Joe's entry, he carefully put the pen down on a magnetized plate that would hold it until he wanted it again. Otherwise it could have floated anywhere about the room.
Compare to anticlamps from Saboteur of Space (1944) by Robert Abernathy.
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Power Planet
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Tech news articles related to The Power Planet
Tech news articles related to works by Murray Leinster
| ISS Plagued By Leak - Again! |
| Sunbird Pulsar Fusion Like Leinster's Space Tug |
| Crystalline Structures In Space, You Say? |
| Amazing Photonic Crystal Light Sail |
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'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
