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"If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Palm Plate | ||
| A device that scanned for a palm print prior to opening a door. |
Nyeeda, the personal secretary to the Matriarch who administered all of Earth, wanted access to Comain, the supercomputer that provided predictions and instructions. Not everyone was provided with unrestricted access to Comain, however.
| An elevator carried Nyeeda deep into the heart of the building and she left the cage at a point three hundred feet below sea level. A metamen, its scanning eyes flaring with ruby light, stepped before her, then, as she gave the password, stood aside and let her pass. A short passage opened into a wide area, and crossing it, the girl pressed her palm against a sensitised plate sunken into the wall beside the thin slit of a closed door. Machinery hummed as the lines of her palm registered on the plate, and, the pattern tripping electronic relays, the door slid smoothly to one side, exposing a small chamber. |
| Technovelgy from The Mechanical Monarch,
by E.C. Tubb. Published by Ace Books in 1958 Additional resources -
|
The palm plate is an early description of what we would today call a biometric identification system.
Compare to the palm lock from Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert.
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
