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"I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'Science Fiction' and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 |
| Vacuum Cylinder | ||
| Traveling first class, but like mail, in a tube system. |
This might be a good description of what it will be like to travel in the Hyperloop, if they ever build one.
| We've got to get into his office secretly, by
tte vacuum cylinders. We're to
meet a man from his office at the
Eighth Postal switch-station."
The girls were both in gray, with long dark capes. We took the public monorail down into the mid-Manhattan section under the city roof of the business district, and into the Eighth Postal switch-station where the sleek bronze cylinders came tumbling out of the vacuum portes to be rerouted and dispatched again, A man was on the lookout for us. "Daniel Dean and party?" "Yes," said Snap. "We were ordered here..." We were put into one of the oversize mail cylinders, routed through the tubes like sacks of recorded letters; and in ten minutes, with a thump that knocked the breath from all of us, we were in the switch-rack of Halsey's outer office. |
| From Wandl, The Invader,
by Ray Cummings. Published by Astounding Stories in 1939 Additional resources -
|
A bit more:
The cylinder-slide opened.
Compare to the vacutubes and the bounce tubes both by Heinlein.
In the service room a passenger
cylinder was waiting. Our guide
entered it with us. At the switch-station we had our breath knocked
out with the bumping, but the
cylinder remained sealed. And after
another ten minutes in the vacuum
tube, we reached our unknown destination.
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'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
There's a lesson in this for neural net AI engineers everywhere.
