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"Does it open a new horizon for my thinking? Does it lead me to think new kinds of thoughts, that I would not otherwise perhaps have thought at all? These qualities are what [make] science fiction ...unique."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Meteor Miner | ||
| Someone who roams the solar system, hunting for metal in meteors. |
First use of this helpful phrase.
| The officers of interplanetary
liners lose no love upon the meteor miners, claiming that their
collected masses of metal, almost helpless, always underpowered, are
menaces to navigation.
 (Meteor Miner from Salvage in Space) |
| From Salvage in Space,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Astounding Stories in 1933 Additional resources -
|
In today's parlance, a meteoroid is a small asteroid, less than a meter in diameter. You'd call it a meteor if it entered the atmosphere and a meteorite if you found it on the ground.
See the first reference to asteroid mining from Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898) by Garrett P. Serviss.
Compare to asteroid mining (blasting) from Asteroid of Gold (1932) by Clifford Simak, the luminous stake markers from The Radium World (1932) by Frank K. Kelly,
asteroid claim law from Jurisdiction (1941) by Nat Schachner,
space placers from The Day We Celebrate (1941) by Nelson S. Bond, the
asteroid mining robot from Catch That Rabbit (1944) by Isaac Asimov, the
asteroid mine from Love Among the Robots (1946) by Emmett McDowell, the coal mole from The Web Between the Worlds (1979) by Charles Sheffield, and
asteroid metal from The Mechanical Monarch (1958) by E.C. Tubb.
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'Noiselessly, on rubber-tired wheels, they journeyed...'
'He immediately turned the small shining disc of the Language Rectifier..'
'The delicious, indescribable pleasure of being a little planet swinging through space...'
'The horse reared up, pawing the air, then sprang into a gallop.'
'...most jobs that require a human form are better done by those organic alternatives.'
'So what we're looking for now is... an anti-agathic, an anti-death drug.'
'With the Scarab as big as a beetle, I could make a Scarab as big as a sand grain.'
'The doctor was a line of machines with a conveyor belt running through them.'
