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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
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| Chunker | ||
| A device that fires small cubes of rubber; a non-lethal form of riot control. |
William Gibson's characters inhabit worlds in which there always seems to be a potential for violence.
| The chunkers weren't even guns, not legally anyway, but a ten-second burst at close range would chew somebody's face off. They were Israeli riot-control devices, air-powered, that fired one-inch cubes of recycled rubber. They looked like the result of a forced union between a bullpup assault rifle and an industrial staple gun, except they were made out of this bright yellow plastic. When you pulled the trigger, those chunks came out in a solid stream. |
| Technovelgy from Virtual Light,
by William Gibson. Published by Bantam in 1993 Additional resources -
|
This is just the sort of weapon that could protect a client, but would be unlikely to result in the death of a client or the client's property.
Research is underway to produce weapons that would give military or police forces a non-lethal choice. Weapon types include antitraction materials (for example, making a sidewalk or street too slippery to walk on). Or (speaking of Spiderman) the WebShot, a 10-ft.-diameter Kevlar net. The net is packed into a projectile and fired from a special shotgun, snaring targets up to 30 feet away.
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'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
