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"The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it."
- Larry Niven
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| Electromagnetic Ring Muscles | ||
| Simulating rigid and fluid limbs with interconnecting metal rings held in place by electromagnetic currents. |
| “Luckily,” she said, her voice amused, “I never was beautiful. It was all — well vivacity, I suppose, and muscular co-ordination. Years and years of training, and all of it engraved here” — she struck her golden helmet a light, ringing blow with golden knuckles — “in the habit patterns grooved into my brain. So this body . . . did he tell you? . . . works entirely through the brain. Electromagnetic currents flowing along from ring to ring, like this.” She rippled a boneless arm at him with a motion like flowing water. “Nothing holds me together — nothing!— except muscles of magnetic currents. And if I’d been somebody else — somebody who moved differently, why the flexible rings would have moved differently too, guided by the impulse from another brain. I'm not conscious of doing anything I haven’t always done. 'The same impulses that used to go out to my muscles go out now to — this.” And she made a shuddering, serpentine motion of both arms at him. like a Cambodian dancer, and then laughed wholeheartedly, the sound of it ringing through the room with such full-throated merriment that he could not help seeing again the familiar face crinkled with pleasure, the white teeth shining. “It’s all perfectly subconscious now,” she told him. “It took lots of practice at first, of course, but now even my signature looks just as it always did — the co-ordination is duplicated that delicately.” She rippled her arms at him again and chuckled.
 (Maltz creating Deidre in 'No Woman Born' by C.L. Moore)) “But Maltzer says my brain will probably wear out quite normally — except, of course, that I won’t have to worry about looking old! — and when it gets tired and stops, the body I’m in won’t be any longer. The magnetic muscles that hold it into my own shape and motions will let go when the brain lets go, and there’ll be nothing but a ... a pile of disconnected rings. If they ever assemble it again, it won’t be me.” |
| Technovelgy from No Woman Born,
by C.L. Moore. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1944 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the sham musculature from The War of the Worlds (1898) by H.G. Wells.
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