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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
 |
| Teakettle | ||
| A standard rocket (uses hydrogen as a booster to leave the atmosphere). |
Heinlein used this term because he saw all spaceships being powered by atomic energy; the atomic pile would heat water or some other reaction matter.
| All I know about spaceships is that the ones that operate from the surface of a planet are true rockets but the voyageurs call them "teakettles" because of the steam jet of water or hydrogen they boost with. |
| From Double Star,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Doubleday in 1956 Additional resources -
|
One of the writing "tricks" that Heinlein uses to great effect in his stories is to use the common vocabulary of my grandparents (like "teakettle") to describe the common elements of the future. It lends a sense of familiarity and unconscious authority to the speaker.
The French Canadian word voyageur is also a nice choice to describe men who lived and worked in space. It neatly designates them as explorers and Americans, as well as spacemen, since the word was originally used to describe guides or traders in early North America.
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