🚀 go-pugleaf

While I was sitting around with the flu last weekend, I reread
"The Venus Belt", by L. Neil Smith.  While not a literary masterpiece,
it does have a nice picture of a nanotech-like technology applied
to settling the asteroids:

"Smartsuits bear about the same relationship to space armor that
modern scuba equipment has to cumbersome nineteenth-century diving
rigs.  Everybody's seen them on the Telecom, a rubbery, one-piece
second skin...  

"Despite appearances, the garment functions primarily as an elaborate
and powerful computer.  Of all the nanoelectronic miracles available
to [21st century] civilization, it is the supreme achievement.  Each
square millimeter of its multilayered fabric measures the wearer's
well-being, making appropriate corrections to air flow, humidity,
temperature, half a dozen other nuances down to the molecular level.
Each square millimeter outside selectively absorbs or reflects a
hundred different forms of energy, powering the suit and protecting
its owner."

The fabric goes unbroken right over your face, but is invisible
because "the surface nanoprocessors pick up wave fronts, assemble
and present them on the inside of the hood."


Now compare this with:

"... there it hangs on the wall, a gray, rubbery-looking thing with a
transparent helmet.  You take it down...

"The suit feels softer than the softest rubber ... You could forget
that you were wearing a suit at all.  What is more, you feel just
as comfortable when you step out into the vacuum of space.

"The suit manages to do this and more by means of complex activity
within a structure having a texture almost as intricate as that of
living tissue.  A glove finger a millimeter thick has room for a
thousand micron-thick layers of active nanomachinery and nanoelectronics..."


Where's this last from?  Engines of Creation, page 90-91.

So what?  So EoC was published in 1987.  Venus Belt was published 
in 1981.

Actually, I asked Eric about this once and he said he thought someone had
mentioned something of the sort.  In fact, Smith seems to have heard
of Eric's various inventions well before they became generally known--
we find on p. 138 that the characters in Venus Belt have used a
"Drexler lightsail" to move their asteroid into its current orbit.

--JoSH