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"I realized there was a heavy-duty change coming in biology, and I could write a really compelling novel about catastrophic evolution, punctuated equilibrium."
- Greg Bear
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| Volplane | ||
| A small vehicle used in transporting people around the moon's surface. |
It should be fun to get from place to place on the lunar surface.
On the rack of the corridor wall by the small air-lock entrance lay a ten-foot long volplane.*
* A Moon vehicle - a toboggan-shaped metal air sled, with low siderails equipped with gravity plates electrolyzed in the fashion of a tiny space flyer. The vehicle is impractical, largely used for sport, the safe handling of it requiring extraordinary skill, the manipulator lying flat, working its controls and maintaining balance by rapid shifting of the body from side to side. Precarious business, this volplane riding; to Georg it had always seemed extreme, for he had never been skillful at it. He crouched now, close under the tiny forward hood, clinging to the handles of the foot-high side rails; and occasionally raising himself to peer forward and down at the shadowed expanses of rocks beneath. |
| Technovelgy from Blood of the Moon,
by Ray Cummings. Published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1936 Additional resources -
|
Even better, you can launch a volplane yourself:
The air in the pressure lock was soon exhausted. Georg slid open the outer door. Together the three moved out into the airless, soundless darkness of the Lunar night, dragging the volplane after them. A dark, iron-railed ledge of rock was here. Beyond it, a precipice dropped off, with the tumbled rocky ramparts of the giant crater of Archimedes widening out down in the lower darkness, six thousand feet down to where the rippled, undulating, rocky expanse of the Mare Imbrium stretched off to the distant horizon.
Compare to the lunocycle from The Rolling Stones (1952) by Robert Heinlein,
the dust-cruiser from A Fall of Moondust (1961) by Arthur C. Clarke.
She... shoved the light bulk of the volplane with a grinding slide over the threshold of the air-lock entrance...
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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...'
