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"There's no point in making a mistake unless you understand the mistake so that you don’t make it again."
- Alfred Bester
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| Symb | ||
| A symbiont life form that provides its human with life-giving energy. |
| Each human-symb pair is a closed ecology, requiring only sunlight and a small amount of solid matter to function. The vegetable symb gathers sunlight in space, using it to convert human waste and carbon dioxide into food and oxygen. At the same time it protects the fragile human from vacuum and the extremes of heat and cold. The symb's body extends into the lungs and through the alimentary canal. Each side feeds the other.
...upon permeating the nervous system of its host, [the symb] is born as a thinking being. It shares the human brain. |
| Technovelgy from The Ophiuchi Hotline,
by John Varley. Published by Quantum Science Fiction in 1977 Additional resources -
|
Compare this idea with that of the star stone from Roger Zelazny's still-amazing 1976 novel Doorways in the Sand as well as the aliens from Robert Heinlein's 1951 novel The Puppet Masters.
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Tech news articles related to works by John Varley
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'...war-balloons, or, as it would be more correct to call them, navigable aerostats.'
'This robot is a creature... It is a manlike being. Therefore, like any other talking, thinking man, he is entitled to a court trial!'
'...small electric motors at the principal joints worked the prosthetic framework by means of steel cables...'
