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"I went [to the top of] Vehicle Assembly Building and looked down, and tears burst from my eyes. The size of this cathedral where the Rockets take off to go to the moon is so amazing."
- Ray Bradbury
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| Android Son | ||
| An android son for a childless couple. |
Here are three vignettes from this short story to illustrate David, a child-sized android with an eight year-old's sensibility.
| Slowly, he shook his head. "If she loved me, then why can't I talk to her?"
"You're being silly, David. Mummy's lonely. That's why she had you." "She's got Daddy. I've got nobody 'cept you, and I'm lonely." Teddy gave him a friendly cuff over the head. "If you feel so bad, you'd better go to the psychiatrist again." "I hate that old psychiatrist - he makes me feel I'm not real." He started to run across the lawn. The bear toppled out of the window and followed as fast as its stubby legs would allow.
Artificial sunlight was growing long and golden across the lawn - and David and Teddy were staring through the window at them.
As the two adults disappeared from the room, boy and bear sat down beneath the standard roses.
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| Technovelgy from Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,
by Brian Aldiss. Published by Harper's Bazaar in 1969 Additional resources -
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Compare to the robot baby from Life Everlasting (1934) by David H. Keller, the robotic infiltrator from Second Variety (1953) by Philip K. Dick, the robot brother from Brother Robot (1958) by Henry Slesar, the Purza the Pukha from The Rowan (1990) by Anne McCaffrey, and the artificial friend from Klara and the Sun (2021) by Kazuo Ishiguro.
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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg.'
'... every veephone on the continent would display, over and over, two propositions.'
'Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil...'
'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.'
