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"Real science opens windows for us to look through. We're right at the footsteps of the most interesting scientists around."
- Larry Niven
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| Xixtline | ||
| Venusian drug provides a rejuvenate effect. |
Mankind has dreamed of youth eternal for millennia, if not forever. SF writers do, too.
| Ham Hammond was a trader...
He was, in fact, trading with the natives for the spore-pods of the Venusian plant xixtchil, from which terrestrial chemists would extract trihydroxyl-tertiary-tolunitrile-beta-anthraquinone, the xixtline or triple-T-B-A that was so effective in rejuvenation treatments. He was pursuing no such abstractions, but the good, solid lure of wealth. Ham was young and sometimes wondered why rich old men—and women—would pay such tremendous prices for a few more years of virility, especially as the treatments didn’t actually increase the span of life, but just produced a sort of temporary and synthetic youth. Gray hair darkened, wrinkles filled out, bald heads grew fuzzy, and then, in a few years, the rejuvenated person was just as dead as he would have been, anyway. But as long as triple-T-B-A commanded a price about equal to its weight in radium, why, Ham was willing to take the gamble to obtain it. |
| Technovelgy from Parasite Planet,
by Stanley G. Weinbaum. Published by Astounding Stories in 1935 Additional resources -
|
Compare to anti-gerasone from Kurt Vonnegut's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, young-forever from A World Out Of Time by Larry Niven, the Sprung-Samser treatments from This Immortal by Roger Zelazny and of course the anti-agathics from James Blish's excellent series Cities in Flight.
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'He found a barber shop which, he thought, would be good for an idle hour.'
'Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines.'
'...the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble.'
'...the walking mills of Puffy Products began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.'
'Here is a Clerk that would work incessantly, and neither eat, sleep, want payment, or grumble.'
'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'
'These are your rudimentary seed packages... Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures.'
