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"The trouble with too much genre SF is that it's so obviously the product of the conscious mind."
- William Gibson
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| Tetrahedron Interference Projector | ||
| Projects a field of force around the Solar System, bending the light of stars to make them seem more distant. |
| Far ahead, a brilliant splash of dazzling white light lay across the corridor. Dain and Ormond paused in stupefaction as they reached it. One side of the corridor was open, without wall or rail, and they looked down as from a giddy catwalk into an immense space that was a colossal room occupying a great part of the giant cylinder. They could not tell how distant were the wglls of the vast chamber, their eyes were so blinded by the thing blazing at its center. It was a stupendous tetrahedron of pure white light, poised with apex uppermost, hanging weightlessly down above the floor of the vast chamber. All around it, in a circle of which the dazzling tetrahedron was the center, stood a ring of huge glass spheres. Each sphere was filled with curdled white light or force, and from each a thin stream of light jetted inward to feed the central tetrahedron... “Ross, these spheres are reservoirs of force !” he cried. “They collect force from the sun and store it somehow in the spheres to keep the tetrahedron going. But what’s it all for?” |
| Technovelgy from The Great Illusion,
by Will Garth. Published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1938 Additional resources -
|
The aliens in the ship bring grim news - humanity has been fooled for countless millennia!
“That can’t be!” exclaimed Kenneth Dain incredulously. “Why, our astronomers have for years measured the stars’ distances, by every delicate method. We know that even the nearest star is countless billions of miles away.”
“We built this great ship, and all it contains, and towed it here into an orbit about your sun. It draws power from your sun, power which is stored in spherical condensers and fed ceaselessly into the shining tetrahedron. That tetrahedron emits a force that maintains a constant sphere of interference around your Solar System, a shell of energy that refracts and bends all light entering this System from the outer Universe. It so distorts and diminishes the lightbeams from the outer stars that from inside the System those stars appear fearfully remote. Aye, and so cunningly that even to the most delicate instruments of your world the stars still appear remote...
“You think that the other stars are unthinkably far from your own Solar System, so distant that they can never be reached. That is the great illusion! For the truth is that the stars are hundreds of times nearer your System than you and your scientists believe. So near are they, indeed, that it would not be hard for you to reach them in craft similar to the one that brought you here.”
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Tech news articles related to The Great Illusion
Tech news articles related to works by Will Garth
| SpaceX EVA Spacesuit Tested By Polaris Dawn Crew |
| ESA To Build Moon Bases Brick By Printed LEGO Brick |
| FLOAT Levitating Train On The Moon ala Clarke |
| SpaceX Intros Extravehicular Activity Suit |
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'What would you do,' Eric asked the robot cabdriver, 'if your wife had turned to stone, your best friend were a toad, and you had lost your job?'
'those suits they wear -- call them 'stillsuits' -- that reclaim the body's own water...'
'Now, except for weight and heat, the same conditions prevail in this chamber as in space.'
'there were so many worms and counterworms loose in the data-net...'
'Now, look, let's start with the three fundamental Rules of Robotics...'
'..the synthetic intellects at the Place of Knowledge had far outstripped the minds of men.'
'But after washing and drying clothes had to be smooth - free from fine lines and wrinkles ...'
