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"This category [science fiction] excludes rocket ships that make U-turns, serpent men of Neptune that lust after human maidens, and stories by authors who flunked their Boy Scout merit badge tests in descriptive astronomy."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Jupiter Mining Shoes | ||
| Specialized footgear for walking on the Great Red Spot. |
| On Earth radium was the rarest of known elements and had to be patiently isolated from tons of uranium residues. But on Jupiter radium existed in a free state in the turgid, semiliquid crust area.
...intrepid Earthman — dredgers and miners — had operated them in ghastly loneliness of spirit in a world where human beings moved with the slowness of exhaustion, incased in protective suits that weighed two hundred pounds, and wearing upon their feet immense shoes that mushroomed on the surface that was neither liquid nor solid, but an amalgam alien to Earth Hamden’s nerves shrieked warnings, protested that it was time to quit. The brief, ten-hour Jovian day was drawing to a close amidst such a plethora of brightness that it seemed to be just beginning. Harnden turned slowly about on his huge flattened shoes, and moved toward the little atmosphere transport which floated in the shadow of the Foam Station a few feet from where he was standing. The turgid substance beneath him was unimaginably queer. The immense surfaces of Hamden’s shoes plopped across it, sinking through the spreading scum from the sprayer, but making only slight depressions, which immediately filled, in the basic substance of the Jeel. By ultimate analysis, it was perhaps more solid than liquid. But it was sufficiently liquid to rear into huge waves, cones and pinnacles of seething menace when the sprayer ceased to function. |
| From Red Storm on Jupiter,
by Frank Belknap Long, Jr.. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1936 Additional resources -
|
This is what it is like to walk on Jupiter's Great Red Spot:
Without Jeel shoes a man would be mired. He would sink in up to his knees, his waist.
His immense shoes left phantasmal tracks of vivid red, tracks that quickly vanished as he moved across the sluggishly streaming, diluent crust...
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'THE red tennis robot scooted desperately across the court...'
'The Consul remembered his first glimpse of the kilometer-long treeship...'
'Do you know what window washing used to cost by the hour?'
'Once the target is confirmed, it uses an IR laser to send a coded signal back to the parent, clearing it to attack.'
'I filled your bullet hole with flesh putty and the lattice.'
'... it will be easy to form an alphabet which shall enable us to converse with the inhabitants of the moon.'
'From the tower's huge octagonal base radiate wide silvery strips...'
'It was about five feet long... a black bullet head and red camera eyes.'
'The Law Society has strict rules on the use of pseudo-intelligent software...'
