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"I was involved in a cloning project. .. to send me into outer space along with a lot of other people. Not the whole me - just a hair from my head, while I still had some. I would thus pop up in another galaxy in the distant future."
- Arthur C. Clarke
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| Hawking Mat | ||
| About two meters long and one meter wide, made of shielded monofilaments, with a bright textile design - okay, it's a flying carpet. |
Pure fun. This is a great treatment of an ingenious idea - a technological implementation of a pure fantasy. The mats are used to great effect in the novel, neatly coinciding with the themes of carefree youth explored.
| It had been more than a century since old Vladimir Sholokov... had handcrafted the first hawking mat for his beautiful young niece on New Earth... Over the decades the toys had become almost absurdly popular - more so with rich adults than with children - until they were outlawed on most Hegemony worlds. Dangerous to handle, a waste of shielded monofilaments, almost impossible to deal with in controlled airspace, hawking mats had become curiosities reserved for bedtime stories, museums, and a few colony worlds.
"...The old dealer in Carvnel Marketplace thought it was worthless. It was... for him. I brought it back to the ship, charged it up, reprogrammed the inertia chips and voila!." Mike palmed the intricate design and the mat stiffened and rose fifteen centimeters... I crawled on the hovering hawking mat behind Mike. He stuffed the backpack between us, told me to hang on, and tapped at the flight designs. |
| From Hyperion,
by Dan Simmons. Published by Doubleday in 1989 Additional resources -
|
In a particularly nice touch, the controls for a Hawking mat are actually part of the design of the "carpet."
Here's what it feels like to fly on one:
"Hang on, I'm going to take control." The hawking mat lurched again, dipped once and then fell steadily. I held on with both hands and resisted the urge to scream...
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news articles:
- Princeton's Magic Carpet
| World's First Autonomous Tram In Germany |
| UberAIR Asks For Skytaxi Landing Prototypes |
| Boring Tunnel Almost Ready |
| Is Teleportation A Death Sentence? |
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