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"At its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we can't predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe."
- John Brunner
 |
| Weather Integrator | ||
| An entire technology for controlling the weather. |
Lazarus Long, oldest member of the Howard Families, is flying a space freighter down to Earth when he runs into a bit of a surprise.
| Entering the stratosphere and circling two-thirds of the globe took no longer than he had estimated. He used part of the hour's leeway he had allowed himself by being very stingy in his maneuvers in order to spare the worn, obsolescent injection meters. Then he was down in the troposphere and making his approach, with skin temperatures high but not dangerously so. Presently he realized what Ford had meant about the weather. Oklahoma and half of Texas were covered with deep, thick clouds. Lazarus was amazed and somehow pleased; it reminded him of other days, when weather was something experienced rather than controlled. Life had lost some flavor, in his opinion, when the weather engineers had learned how to harness the elements. He hoped that their planet-if they found one!-would have some nice, lively weather. Then he was down in it and too busy to meditate. In spite of her size the freighter bucked and complained. Whew! Ford must have ordered this little charivari the minute the time was set-and, at that, the integrators must have had a big low-pressure area close at hand to build on. |
| From Methuselah's Children,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
|
The weather integrators were not able to handle everything Mother Nature dishes out:
"...this emergency will be somewhat less troublesome than a low pressure minimum too big for the weather integrators."
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- China's Weather Modification Office
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| L16 Revolutionary Optics Spells End For Ordinary DSLRs? |
| MIT Tunes Ions For Frictionless Surface - Superlubricity! |
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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'Household Automata received an urgent task to develop production units of бытовые тканевые разглаживатели - a household fabric smoother.'
'...what's to keep me from showing face, Man? I'm showing a voice this instant... I can show a face the same way.'
'It was cheaper to pay the refugees to go without up-to-the-minute equipment.'
'...a 2045 convertible with a Hennis-Carleton positronic motor and an Armat chassis.'
'You can hook a Thorsen tube into a control circuit... and the tube will "remember" what was done and can direct the operation...'
Nature is a master of fabricating structured materials consisting of living and non-living components.
'The tiny devices chirped their impulse codes at one another...'
Then some unknown race had chanced upon the dreamers and decided to "help them out."
