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"...science fiction is sort of like a sociological genome. It's a huge range of possible futures, most of them useless; some vital. You never really know in advance."
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Although Gallun did not invent the LMT, he makes good use of it as alien technology. Number 774, the Martian mentioned in the story, made great use of different exoskeletons to perform different tasks.
See if you can spot what appears to be an error in his use of the liquid mirror telescope in the quote below.
He states that the cylinder was tipped at a steep angle; a real liquid mirror telescope has to remain fixed with the "bowl" perpendicular to gravity's pull.
('Old Faithful' by Raymond Z. Gallun) In the story, Number 774 discovers people of the Earth using the telescope; he positions it to look at a particular part of the Earth during each observation session. Since an actual LMT cannot be "steered" (it can only look at the patch of sky directly above the instrument), the user cannot choose to focus directly on any object in the visible sky, as you can with a regular telescope. Compare to the Photoelectric Telescope (Photoelectric Eyes) from The Cometeers (1936) by Jack Williamson, the electro-telescope from Blood of the Moon (1936) by Ray Cummings, the ultra-telescope ray from The Moon Weed (1931) by Harl Vincent, the hyperspace beacon from The Repairman (1959) by Harry Harrison, and the robot observatory from Space Rating (1939) by John Berryman. Comment/Join this discussion ( 8 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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