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"The first thing that's wrong with being a science-fiction writer today is that the present has caught up with the future and surpassed it."
- Peter Watts
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| Flying Eye | ||
| A remote-controlled device for surveillance overflight. |
When trying to repair a broken hyperspace beacon on a distant planet, it's always a good idea to get some idea of the "lay of the land" before going in oneself.
| Staying outside the atmosphere, I sent a Flying Eye down to look things over. In this business, you learn early where and when to risk your own skin. The Eye would be good enough for the preliminary survey.
...There was a nose and tail radar in the Eye, and I fed their signals in to a scope as an amplitude curve. When the two [landmark mountain] peaks coincided, I spun the Eye controls and dived the thing down. |
| Technovelgy from The Repairman,
by Harry Harrison. Published by Galaxy Science Fiction in 1959 Additional resources -
|
The Eye could be controlled manually, or it could be locked into a particular course. For example, you might want the device to circle a particular location at a set radius and altitude.
Take a look at the copseye from Larry Niven's 1972 short story Cloak of Anarchy and the Raytron apparatus from Ray Cummings' 1928 classic Beyond the Stars for different takes on this ancient wish (remote viewing - see Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, circa 200 BC).
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
