| 1982 W. Gibson Hinterlands in W. Gibson Burning Chrome (1986) 78
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Tsiolkovsky 1 is fixed at the libration point between Earth's gravity and the moon's, but we need a lightsail to hold us here, twenty tons of aluminum spun into a hexagon, ten kilometres from side to side. That sail towed us out from Earth orbit, and now it's our anchor.
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| 1988 R. Silverberg We are for Dark in Coll. Stories (1993)II. 342
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Small unmanned starships, laser-powered robot drones, unfurling great lightsails and gliding starwards on the urgent breath of photonic winds that we ourselves stirred up.
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| 1990 R. L. Forward Rocheworld 1
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The torn shred of aluminum lightsail rippled lightly down through the thin atmosphere.
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| 1990 L. Niven Madness Has Its Place in L. Niven et al. Man-Kzin Wars III (1992) iii. 29
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Light-sails are rare in the inner solar system. Between Venus and Mercury there are still light-sail races, an expensive, uncomfortable and dangerous sport‥. The last refuge of the light-sail is a huge, empty region: the cometary halo, Pluto and beyond. The light-sails are all cargo craft.
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| 1990 F. Pohl World at End of Time (1993) 11
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The unanticipated flare would be pouring our wholly unexpected floods of photons, and, as the light sail had already been deployed to help in Mayflower's long, slow deceleration, the fare would be shoving them off course and their speed would be decreasing too rapidly.
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| 1994 I. McDonald Necroville (1995) 110
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They have a policy of buying up your contract while you're still swimming in your Jesus tanks. “Nightfreighting”: shipping mining plants and crew out to the asteroids in the form of cheap light-sail drivers with slap-on tector packages.
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| 1996 B. Aldrin & J. Barnes Encounter with Tiber 97
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The rest of the first forty seconds or so showed them deploying a light sail, sailing away from Alpha Centauri with a couple of gravity assists, making their way to the solar system, and descending to Earth.
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| 1998 I. McDonald Days of Solomon Gursky in G. Dozois Mammoth Bk. Best New Sci. Fiction, 12th Coll. (1999) 245
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The breaking wave of particles, with multiple gravity assists from Luvah and Enitharmon, would surf the bright flotilla up to interstellar velocities, as, at the end of the centuries—millennia—long flights, the light-sails would brake the packages at their destinations.
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| 2002 A. Reynolds Redemption Ark 391
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He had started turning Skade's light-sails to his own side, training his own optical lasers on them as they passed in the night and steering them into the paths of the chasing ships.
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| 2005 C. Stross Accelerando v. 172
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Many of those are now passengers or spectators of the Field Circus: a light-sail craft that is speeding out of Sol system on a laser beam generated by Amber's installations in low-Jupiter orbit.
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