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"We were essentially being shell-shocked by rapid change. That was one of the things you needed science-fiction writers for back in the Sixties, because we could cope with the future."
- Peter Watts
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| 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. |
| Technovelgy 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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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
