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"Everything starts as somebody's daydream. And, when you're daydreaming, it is science fiction. It's when you start work out how you put it together, true science fiction becomes real science."
- Larry Niven
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| Robot-Surgeon | ||
| A perfect robot for perfected human beings. |
In the story, Rex starts out as a doctor for other robots, but eventually learns what he needs to know about human beings.
| IT WAS a thing of glistening levers and bell cranks, of flexible shafting, cams, and delicate mechanical fingers, of vacuum tubes and photo-electric cells, of relays that clicked in ordered sequence when called upon to perform their myriad functions, of pumps, tanks, condensers, reactances, microphones, and loud-speakers. A robot, created by the master scientists of the twenty-third century.
 (Rex the Robot-Surgeon) The robot-surgeon, it was sometimes called. And indeed the term was most appropriate, for this robot was chief of the mechanicals ; its control tubes and relays provided the ability not only to diagnose swiftly and unerringly the slightest electrical or mechanical faults of the lesser robots but to supervise their correction... Rex peered into a white-walled room where human surgeons operated on human patients. He observed that their procedure was much the same as his own ; that they dissected the body or head or other portions of human anatomy and made repairs in similar manner to that which he used on his own robot patients. Forthwith, he began, in the library, an intensive study of the human brain and anatomy. |
| Technovelgy from Rex,
by Harl Vincent. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1934 Additional resources -
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Science Fiction
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'...they moved with the ease of dandelion puffs.'
'...some bored drone pusher in a remote driving centre...'
'These pods were programmed to hang in space in a hexagonal grid pattern...'
'...the meteor caught and halted just as a small boy catches a swift ball in his cap.'
'We have decided that it shall be but one ship... it must contain everything needed to take us through the generations.'
'You’re the robopsychologist of the plant, so you’re to study the robot itself...'
