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"As a writer, I don't want to chew my cud. I don't want to have to spit out and regurgitate the same stuff again."
- Harlan Ellison
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| Gyro Two-Wheeled Truck | ||
| A gyroscopically-stabilized truck with just two wheels. |
| Now Alexander saw that the two-wheeled truck was still waiting, backed up to the loading platform...
 (Gyro Truck from 'The Sign of the Tiger' by Nourse and Meyer) The Gyro was one of the air-driven Robling types, very simple, vey reliable, the flywheel driven by a tiny stream of air impinging on the peripheral turbine blades. Once it was in motion, very little air was needed to keep the heavy rotor turning at a high enough velocity to stabilize tha truck. |
| Technovelgy from The Sign of the Tiger,
by Alan Nourse (w/Meyer). Published by Amazing Science Fiction Stories in 1958 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the gyrocar from Two Boys in a Gyrocar the story of a New York to Paris motor race (1911) by Kenneth Brown, the Gyro-Hat from An Experiment in Gyro-Hats (1926) by Ellis Parker Butler, the tumblebug from The Roads Must Roll (1940) by Robert Heinlein, the Two-Wheeled Ground Car from First Lensman (1950) by E.E. 'Doc' Smith, the Gyrocar (Gyro) from The Ring (1969) by Piers Anthony (w/R. Margroff) and the smart bike from Distraction (1998) by Bruce Sterling.
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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?'
