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"...a few centuries of coherent humanist thought, set against a million odd years of evolved killer ape tendency. No-one's going to give you very good odds on humanism, are they?"
- Richard Morgan
 |
| Power-skis | ||
| Just the accoutrement for exploration, depending on the world. |
| JOAN strapped on her power-skis and straightened up. Behind her Dome Kappa gleamed in the milky sunshine, a great bubble reflecting the feeble sunshine and the white, cloud-furrowed sky. In front of her her husband stood erect on a low hill, impermasuit shining silver, heat-gun slung over his shoulder, a tall, gallant figure facing the sinister desolation of an untamed planet . . . “Damn showoff” Joan growled, skiing laboriously toward him.
“What?” said a polite, arrogant voice in her earpiece. She had forgotten they were hooked up. “I said let’s be off.”
 (Power Skis from 'Selection' by Ursula K. Le Guin) “Right!” he said, and vanished. He had grown up in Dome Beta, near the so-called Alps, where they did a lot of skiing just for pleasure. Jaw set, teeth locked, Joan labored after him, her skis constantly trying to shoot out from under her and raising all around her great clouds of bacterial dust, through which she now and then saw his bright figure skimming on ahead. |
| Technovelgy from Selection,
by Ursula Le Guin. Published by Amazing Stories in 1964 Additional resources -
|
She continues:
But there he was, not fifteen feet from her. She circled back, cut her ski-power, and bent over him. He lay sprawled head downward on a slope, and she could make out in the dark grey twilight what had spilled him : coming over the crest of the slope he had skied down onto a stretch of naked rock, where a big patch of one of the virulent native phages had cleared away all other life and then died of starvation, leaving a few meters bare of snow for a day or two.
Compare to moon skis from Requiem (1940) by Robert Heinlein.
Heinlein also used skis in this 1949 story, published in Boys Life.
And he veered off to the right, executing a few fancy slaloms down a slope, and zoomed on till he was hardly more than a shiny dot describing a larger orbit in the distance. Free at last of the pressure of his constant presence, Joan skied on in a kind of visually alert doze. Slowly the afternoon darkened. Even a thirty-hour day sinks to evening at last. She began to feel hungry, and wondered when he would suggest they return to the bubble. But he said nothing. He wanted her to admit she was tired first. Damned if she would I She went on, drugged by the rhythm of the power-skis. Lights in Dome Kappa shone golden...
(Moonskis in 'Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon' by Robert Heinlein)
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from Selection
More Ideas
and Technology by Ursula Le Guin
Tech news articles related to Selection
Tech news articles related to works by Ursula Le Guin
Power-skis-related
news articles:
- Vipera Electric Skis From Frigid Dynamics
| 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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'...small electric motors at the principal joints worked the prosthetic framework by means of steel cables...'
'Living protoplasm incorporated into the Ampek F-a2 recording system...'
'Twoflower's Luggage, which was currently ambling along on its little legs...'
'He came to as the ship went into free flight, arching in a high parabola over the plains...'
'The peculiar quality of this light, which gave it its great preeminence over all other penetrating rays...'
'The overworked leg motor would have to cool down before he could work on it...'
‘Where to, sport?’ the starter at cab relay asked.
