Tag: war

Saturday Special from the Vaults: Picking the Bones

This is an unpublished and, as far as I know, never-submitted short-short I rediscovered in my files. I think I may have written it at Banff during the Writing With Style workshop on writing science fiction with Robert J. Sawyer, the same workshop out of which came Marseguro. The landing pod settled in the middle …

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Nanotech battle suits

  In his 1959 novel Starship Troopers (the movie of the same name has almost nothing in common with the book–ignore it!), Robert Heinlein invented the idea of powered battle armor, which gave an infantryman more fighting power than a modern tank, protected him from battlefield hazards, allowed central command to locate him and monitor …

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Nuclear testing

With the explosion of “nuclear devices” (aka “bombs”) in the past couple of weeks, India and Pakistan have joined the “nuclear club,” and also, alas. brought nuclear weapons into the forefront of the news for the first time in years. So perhaps it’s time for a little refresher course on just how a nuclear bomb …

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Radar

With the end of the Cold War, a lot of previously classified military technology is making its way into civilian hands. Spy satellites whose very existence was top secret, for instance, are now being used to survey crops. This post-war transfer of technology from military to civilian use is not new: it happened after the …

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Hobart’s Funnies

Necessity is the mother of invention, as the old saying goes; and in warfare, necessities can be urgent indeed. As a result, many technological innovations occur during wartime. The First World War brought us huge advances in aircraft design; the Second World War brought us atomic energy. But on a less grandiose scale, technical innovations …

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