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"I believe in limited government, and the 20th century has been the century of government. The data is uniform. The government has failed at every single task it has set out to do, with the exception of waging war."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Menslator | ||
| A translator that works by examining the mental image of what you are trying to say. |
Scyth Radnor is trying to explain to the beings on the third planet from the sun that it might be necessary to move their planet just a bit. Better get the menslator.
| ...Scyth Radnor, tinkering with his menslator on the darkside of Mercury, caught a whisper of a signal. He tuned his passband carefully, trying to peak it into one response strong enough to resolve into definitive thought, but the band was spread too wide, the thoughts were too diversified...
...he turned back to his menslator and turned up the gain. It radiated, for them, echoing the mishmash of thoughts directed back and forth across the face of Terra. |
| From Troubled Star,
by George O. Smith. Published by Better Publications in 1952 Additional resources -
|
Fortunately, it's not very big, so you can carry it around when you speak with the natives.
Compare this item to Larry Niven's translator disks from Ringworld (1970) and of course Douglas Adams' Babel fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Scyth laughed. He touched a little case hanging at his belt. "This gadget is what we call a menslator," he said. "It is always used in speaking to people on planets other than our own.
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Okay, sf fans. If you could have some art created from a science fiction sentence, what sentence would you pick?
'There were the cleaners, with large padded feet, who were apparently polishing their way the whole length...'
It's fascinating to me how the Apollo program forced people to think outside their usual boxes.
'Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures, like excavators or centipedes.'
'the hair-fine wire going deep into Owen's brain, down into the pleasure center.'
'There was a dim whirring, and the spheres tipped and began to rotate...'
'The houses are prefabricated units... and they sell at the flat rate of five hundred dollars a room — set up.'
