Sometime you read a story and it’s not great, maybe forgettable. But the book has an idea and that idea has legs.
Gallagher’s Glacier has a standard plot of asteroid miners treated like slaves rebelling. One of the heroes of the story builds a space ship out of a comet.
Using the fuel or a comet for the body of the space ship has been used in stories again and again. Even today they talk of mining water on Earth’s moon for life support and fuel.
After having a space craft land on a comet it is now a plausible idea to make a space ship out of a comet. Until the landing we didn’t know if the dirty snowball of a comet was solid enough to support anything. The comet lander could have sunk into the surface of the comet.
I can also remember the description of an asteroid made into a spaceship as being made out of one of the more craggier asteroids. Who would of thought, back in the 1950s or even 1980s, that asteroids have craters and lose boulders laying around on the surface.
With modern insulating materials, a comet would make a good interplanetary space ship. With a fusion generator it would make for a interstellar spaceship. Have fuel will travel.
In his Instrumentality series Cordwainer Smith’s has a society that has developed immortality, but limits it to certain people. The age is coming where any device can be duplicate and any medicine can be cloned, I don’t see how the immortality drug could be kept secret.
I always wanted to see stories about secret laboratories on back water planets that were trying to break the mystery of the immortality drug. Or stories attemps to steal the drug. The planet it was made on would be heavily guarded and being the only place where the drug was would be a target of vengeance. Also an example of not putting all your eggs in one basket.
How much would someone pay to live 400 years? How sneaky could you be to get the drug?
The stories would not sell today since the animal derived people in the stories had no rights and were almost slaves.
Still the series investigates what a society would do if immortality was developed. Some books had you earn credit to buy time to live. The Instrumentality stories had a set time limit for that immortals could live. Somewhat Logan’s Run.
The usual add;
Recipe
Salad with bacon bits.
No salad with bacon strip.
Ingredients;
1 bag of salad greens
1 bottle of salad dressing
1 slice of bacon
Directions;
Place handful of greens on plate.
Top greens with two tablespoons of dressing.
Place strip of bacon along side salad.