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"Modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us, the possible consequences, and the possible solutions."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Mole Probe | ||
| Automated devices that seek underground routes, burrowing as they go. |
| At the expense of a few mole probes they found out that reaching the city through a tunnel was equally impossible. The moles burrowed into the coarse sandy soil outside the outer walls, chewed themselves passageways fifty meters down, and nosed upward again when they were beneath the maze. They were destroyed by the safety field while still twenty meters below ground level. A try at burrowing in right at the base of the embankments also failed; the field went straight down, apparently, all around the city. |
| Technovelgy from The Man in the Maze,
by Robert Silverberg. Published by Avon Books in 1969 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the mechanical mole from Oath of Fealty by Pournelle and Niven (1981), the photic borer from The Great Stone of Sardis (1897) by Frank Stockton, the mechanical earthworm from Death Dives Deep by Paul Ernst (1936), the bore-pellets from Foster, You're Dead (1955) by Philip K. Dick and the automatic shell from The Great Stone of Sardis (1897) by Frank Stockton.
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Tech news articles related to works by Robert Silverberg
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| The Morphing Wheel And The Smartwheel |
| Transporting Antimatter |
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'Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera.'
'... folios and tapes and playable discs of platinum alloy.'
'... another corner of his mind began to think about the shields.'
'Michel Ardan, as a Frenchman, was declared chief cook, an important function, which raised no rival.'
'Sapiro’s computer just kept dialing at random, hanging up on humans, until it got a fellow computer of the same type as itself.'
'I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks.'
