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"I realized there was a heavy-duty change coming in biology, and I could write a really compelling novel about catastrophic evolution, punctuated equilibrium."
- Greg Bear
 |
| 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
| 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.'
