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"Bureaucracies hide their mistakes, because people's careers are tied to those mistakes. Therefore, bureaucracies are a perfect mechanism for perpetuating mistakes."
- Frank Herbert
 |
| Sun Dome | ||
| Used on Venus to give relief from the endless rain. |
On Venus, the rain falls endlessly below an unremitting gray sky, and never a sight of the sun. It could drive men mad.
| The two men sat together in the rain. Behind them sat two other men who were wet and tired and
slumped like clay that was melting. The lieutenant looked up. He had a face that once had been
brown and now the rain had washed it pale, and the rain had washed the color from his eyes and they
were white, as were his teeth, and as was his hair. He was all white. Even his uniform was beginning
to turn white, and perhaps a little green with fungus...
They crossed the river, and in crossing they thought of the Sun Dome, somewhere ahead of them, shining in the jungle rain. A yellow house, round and bright as the sun. A house fifteen feet high by one hundred feet in diameter, in which was warmth and quiet and hot food and freedom from rain. And in the center of the Sun Dome, of course, was a sun. A small floating free globe of yellow fire, drifting in space at the top of the building where you could look at it from where you sat, smoking or reading a book or drinking your hot chocolate crowned with marshmallow dollops. There it would be, the yellow sun, just the size of the Earth sun, and it was warm and continuous, and the rain world of Venus would be forgotten as long as they stayed in that house and idled their time. |
| Technovelgy from The Illustrated Man,
by Ray Bradbury. Published by Doubleday in 1951 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the sunray tank from Warlord of Mars (1914) by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Illustrated Man
More Ideas
and Technology by Ray Bradbury
Tech news articles related to The Illustrated Man
Tech news articles related to works by Ray Bradbury
Sun Dome-related
news articles:
- SunTracker One Brings The Sun Inside
| Beautiful Visualization of Dawn Spacecraft |
| Tumblin' Tumbleweed Rovers To Eplore Mars |
| Tentacled Robot Captures Space Debris |
| Reflect Orbital Sunlight On Demand |
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
