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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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| Star Machine | ||
| A device that serves as a boost to psychokinetic powers of mind, enabling paranormals to send their awareness to distant planets. |
Shepherd Blaine is a space explorer, but he never leaves the earth. A member of a corporation called Fishhook, he sends his mind where nature has made it so difficult for human bodies to go.
| He crawled upward from the well of darkness into which he had been plunged, groping his way with a blind persistence that was almost driven instinct... Blaine opened his eyes and saw that the lid of the place in which he lay had been tilted back, and the glare of brightness that was a hooded light bulb was stabbing down at him. He took inventory of his body and it was all right. There was no reason for it not to be all right, for it had lain here and rested for all of 30 hours.
 (Star Machine from 'Time is the Simplest Thing' by Clifford Simak) He climbed from the coffin-like machine and shivered, for he was suddenly cold. "Here's your jacket, sir," one of the faces said, a face that surmounted a white smock. It was coming back, familiar now as he stood there are sipping at his glass of milk, the great operations room with its rows of glistening star machines, some of which were closed while the rest stood open. And in the closed ones lay others like himself, their bodies left behind and their minds far out in space. |
| Technovelgy from Time is the Simplest Thing,
by Clifford Simak. Published by Doubleday in 1961 Additional resources -
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Star Machine-related
news articles:
- Symbiotic Sphere By Space Synapse
| San Francisco Autobus |
| Volvo's Autonomous Truck |
| Eviation Alice Electric Plane First Flight |
| Robotaxi By Cruise Premieres in Austin, Texas |
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'The pitiless M rays pierced Earth and steel and densest concrete as if they were so much transparent glass...'
'Pina2bo would have to operate full blast for many years to put as much SO2 into the stratosphere as its namesake had done in a few minutes.'
'Nanny is different,' Tom Fields murmured... 'she's not like a machine. She's like a person.'
'We made a crude , small cell and were delighted - and, I admit, somewhat surprised - to find it worked.'
'...we've promised him a generous pension from the royalties.'
'The clothes and jewelery drew their tiny power requirements from her movements.'
'At the end of each appendage's eight fingers there are tinier appendages...'
'We want to do something to help those who are suffering from tooth loss or absence,' said lead researcher Katsu Takahashi.
