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"Beyond a thousand years from now humans are not quite recognizably human, and I have trouble finding characters."
- Larry Niven
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| Anemopter | ||
| Special craft for journeys through the atmosphere of a gas giant planet. |
This created word is a portmanteau of ánemos (wind) and pteron (wing). Just for fun, see the origin of the term gas giant.
| The boat-like anemopter that Valadez had sent for them had a cruising speed of just less than the speed of sound, which in this part of Sky’s atmosphere meant about nine hundred kilometers per hour. The speed, Bianca thought, might have been calculated to bring home the true size of Sky, the impossible immensity of it. It had taken the better part of their first day’s travel for the anemopter’s point of departure, the ten-kilometer, billion-ton vacuum balloon Transient Meridian, to drop from sight—the dwindling golden droplet disappearing, not over the horizon, but into the haze. From that Bianca estimated that the bowl of clouds visible through the subtle blurring of the anemopter’s static fields covered an area about the size of North America...
She followed it forward to the anemopter’s rounded prow. The naturalist, Erasmus Fry, was already there, resting his elbows on the rail, looking down. |
| Technovelgy from Finisterra,
by David Moles. Published by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2007 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the kite-copter car in The Kokod Warriors (1952) by Jack Vance.
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
