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"I'm a farm boy. It's very interesting; you can detect self-starting characteristics in this society and they are strongest among people who have had some kind of rural upbringing and a very impressionable stage."
- Frank Herbert
 |
| Boat-Tree | ||
| A tree, the pods of which can be grown as boats. |
| The Lhaiz was a two-masted barque…with purple sails and a commodious cabin. It had been grown on a special boat-tree, one piece even to the main-mast, which originally had been the stem of the pod. The foremast, sprit, booms and rigging were fabricated parts, a situation as irking to the Iszic mind as mechanical motion to an Earth electronics engineer. |
| From The Houses of Iszm,
by Jack Vance. Published by Better Publications in 1954 Additional resources -
|
If you are interested in vehicles created from living beings (an obscure category anywhere but on Technovelgy!), take a look at the float-homes from Frank Herbert's 1969 novel Whipping Star and the treeship from Dan Simmon's 1989 novel Hyperion.
Thanks to writer and editor Dominic Brown for contributing this item.
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Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
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SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
There's a lesson in this for neural net AI engineers everywhere.
