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"I was driving a dynamite truck when I was 14 years old in North Carolina."
- Harlan Ellison
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| Electrono-Mirror | ||
| Focuses the sun's rays on a planetary surface for terraforming purposes. |
| Uranus boasted its tiny colonies; Neptune was now being studied for a colonization project. And far Pluto was under constant electrono-mirror bombardment that its icy surface might some day be cleared. |
| Technovelgy from The Day We Celebrate,
by Nelson S. Bond. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the reflecting Artificial sun from Revolt on Inferno (1931) by Victor Rousseau, the synchrophased power beams from Murray Leinster's The Propagandist (1947), the spot light of heat from Niven/Pournelle/Flynn's Fallen Angels (1991) and Clifford Simak's solar energy beam from Masquerade (1941).
For those keeping track, this story was in the January, 1941 issue of Astounding, while Theodore Sturgeon's orbiting mirror was in the February issue, in a clever short story called Completely Automatic.
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and Technology from The Day We Celebrate
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Tech news articles related to works by Nelson S. Bond
| Is China Mining Helium-3 On The Moon's Farside? |
| Solitary Black Hole Wanders In Space |
| Spaceplane From Virgin Atlantic |
| Taikonauts Exercise In China's Tiangong Space Station |
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
