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"...the people dealing with these new technologies will still be derived from the human stock we're familiar with today."
- Charles Stross
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| Mite | ||
| A very small device (about the size of a dust mite) that has been manufactured for a particular purpose. |
I really enjoyed the way he wrote about nature and artifice in this passage. From the standpoint of the narrator, the creatures of the natural world and the tiny robots are on the same level.
| They found a lot of mites, of course, both natural and artificial. The natural ones looked like little crabs and had been quietly inhabiting the outer layers of other creatures bodies for hundreds of millions of years. The artificial ones had been developed in the past few decades. Most of them consisted of a spherical or ellipsoidal hull with various attachments. |
| Technovelgy from The Diamond Age,
by Neal Stephenson. Published by Bantam Books in 1995 Additional resources -
|
Mites are, of course, real creatures; they are tiny arachnids that consume bits of skin or other organic matter.
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'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
'The greatest problem of all was the elimination of the human element of braking together with its inevitable time lag.'
'Across the ancient sea floor a dozen tall, blue-sailed Martian sand ships floated, like blue smoke.'
'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
