Thursday, January 30, 2014

Atomic Machines

I have a guest post today at the excellent blog Alternate History Update.   Atomic Machines: an Atompunk Sampler briefly discusses some of my favorite products of Atomic Age imaginations.

3 comments:

  1. Several of the themes of your article are used by Charlie Stross in his short story 'Missile Gap', which you can read here:
    http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/spring_2007/fiction_missile_gap_by_charles_stross/

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  2. I am a huge Charlie Stross fan. It doesn't really come up on the blog, but my other hobby besides atompunk history is reading Cthulhu Mythos fiction, and "A Colder War" and the Laundry series are two of my favorites.

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  3. I believe that PLUTO has one enduring legacy: Coors developed special graphite-ceramic moderators for the reactor: slim, light, strong, stable at high temperatures, and shock-resistant (albeit by the standards of ceramics)... They became the company's biggest commercial success.

    You've probably used one yourself: that branch of the Coors empire became the world's leading producer of pencil leads, and the 'propelling pencil' probably would not have achieved the degree of popularity it did if the brittle baked-clay-and-charcoal 'lead' had remained the peak of the technology.

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