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"[Science fiction is] anything that turns you and your social context, the social you, inside out."
- Gregory Benford
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| Machine Birds | ||
| Flock of mechanical winged birds. |
| At the top of the hill, she stopped to recover her breath, but the boy didn't greet us or even look our way. He had in his hands a circular device, and was looking at the sky between the two houses where a group of birds was flying in formation, and I quickly realized these were machine birds. He kept his gaze on them and when he touched his control, the birds responded by changing their pattern.
‘Wow, they're beautiful,' Josie said, though still short of breath. ‘Are they new?' Rick kept his gaze fixed on the birds, but said: ‘Those two on the end are new. You can tell they don't really match.' The birds swooped till they were hovering directly above us. ‘Yeah, but real birds don't all look the same either,' Josie said. ‘I suppose. At least I've got the whole team taking the same commands now. Okay, Josie, watch this.' The machine birds began to come down, landing one by one on the grass in front of us. But two remained in the air, and Rick, frowning, pressed his remote again. ‘God. Still not right.' ‘But they look great, Ricky.' Josie was standing surprisingly close to Rick, not actually touching him, but with hands raised just behind his back and left shoulder. ‘What those two need is a complete recalibration.' |
| Technovelgy from Klara and the Sun,
by Kazuo Ishiguro. Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2021 Additional resources -
|
Compare to tiny robot planes from Blood on the Sun (1942) by Hal K. Wells.
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Science Fiction
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
