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"it slowly dawned on me that the landscape of science is maybe what interests people a great deal in science fiction."
- Gregory Benford
 |
| Mass Pointer | ||
| Tells you where the really large (star-sized) masses are while you travel in hyperspace. |
| The mass pointer is a big transparent sphere with a number of blue lines radiating from the center. The direction of the line is the direction of a star; its length shows the star's mass. We wouldn't need pilots if the mass pointer could be hooked into an autopilot, but it can't. Dependable as it is, accurate as it is, the mass pointer is a psionic device. It needs a mind to work it. I'd been using mass pointers for so long that those lines were like real stars. |
| From Crashlander,
by Larry Niven. Published by Del Rey in 1994 Additional resources -
|
From the short story At the Core.
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'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
There's a lesson in this for neural net AI engineers everywhere.
