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"As the rate of technological development speeds up, the gap between science fiction and what we’re living now is getting narrower all the time."
- Richard Morgan
 |
| Flywheel Cycle | ||
| A motorcycle powered by a flywheel. |
A very Eco-friendly solution.
| We froze, rigid, as a pair of flywheel cycles moaned and skidded to a stop by our car. Only the police used these since they move a good deal faster than the peat-powered steamers. They are tricycle affairs with a great heavy flywheel encased between the rear wheels. They plugged them in at night so their motor-generators could run the flywheel up to top speed. During the day the flywheel generated electricity to drive the motors in each wheel. Very efficient and smog-free. Very dangerous. |
| Technovelgy from The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge,
by Harry Harrison. Published by Pyramid in 1970 Additional resources -
|
John Brunner used the same idea with buses in his 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar:
Across the hugely enlarged sidewalks the people thronged like insects,
milling at the access points to underpasses and the subway. On the central,
official-business-only emergency lane prowl cars cruised or paused,
occasionally pulling over to make way for ambulances and fire trucks. Either
side of the centre, the huge humming buses without engines—drawing their
power from flywheels spun up to maximum revolutions when they turned
around at the end-points of their journey—hauled their loads of up to two
hundred passengers, sliding at two-block intervals into pickup bays and
allowing the electric cabs to overtake. No internal combustion engine had
been legal in the city since they put up the dome; the disposal of CO2 and
anthropotoxins from the people themselves was as much as the ventilation
system could handle, and on warm days their exuded moisture sometimes
overloaded the conditioners, precipitating a kind of drizzle underneath the
dome.
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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.'
