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"To get anywhere, or even live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Grapple Tracks | ||
| A means of automating the process of parking and releasing passenger vehicles from a parking garage. |
Herbert didn't need to add this detail, but it's an interesting idea. In films like Minority Report, you see vehicles which are sometimes under manual control, and sometimes under the control of a central traffic network. In this case, the difficulty of having a traffic network covering an open road is recognized. Instead, the more sensible place to automate is in a very constricted area - a parking garage.
| He activated the grapple tracks. The skitter jerked into motion, danced sideways, and slid smoothly down the driveway to the street. |
| From The Dosadi Experiment,
by Frank Herbert. Published by Berkley Putnam in 1977 Additional resources -
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The author uses this detail to both show the ingenuity of the Dosadi, and their painstaking efforts to automate mindless tasks.
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