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"...science fiction is sort of like a sociological genome. It's a huge range of possible futures, most of them useless; some vital. You never really know in advance."
- Peter Watts
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| Brain Class | ||
| Class ten brain is the lowest. |
| "Why have you had no orders
this morning?" asked the fieldminder. "Because the radio issued none," said the unlocker, slowly rotating a dozen of its arms. "Because the radio station in the city was issued with no orders this morning," said the penpropeller. And there you had the distinction between a class six and a class three brain, which was what the unlocker and the pen-propeller possessed respectively. All machine brains worked with nothing but logic, but the lower the class of brain-class ten being the lowest-the more literal and less informative answers to questions tended to be. "You have a class three brain; I have a class three brain," the field-minder said to the penner. "We will speak to each other. This lack of orders is unprecedented. Have you further information on it?" "Yesterday orders came from the city. Today no orders have come. Yet the radio has not broken down. Therefore they have broken down," said the little penner. "The men have broken down?" "All men have broken down." "That is a logical deduction," said the field-minder. "That is the logical deduction," said the penner. "For if a machine had broken down, it would have been quickly replaced. But who can replace a man?" |
| Technovelgy from But Who Can Replace A Man,
by Brian Aldiss. Published by Infinity in 1958 Additional resources -
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Science Fiction
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
