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"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Boulder | ||
| A device that homed in on a person's brain wave pattern; a very specific assassination device. |
| The weapon which Herb Lackmore had been provided with contained a costly replica of the encephalic brainwave pattern of James Briskin. He needed merely to place the device within a few miles of Briskin, screw in the handle, and then, with a switch, detonate it.
It was a mechanism, he decided, which provided little if any personal satisfaction. |
| Technovelgy from Cantata 140,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1964 Additional resources -
|
This device is a perfect example of needle-eyeification, a concept that Dick elucidates with gusto in his 1965 novel The Zap Gun.
Compare this device to the mechanical cobra from Roger Zelazny's 1967 masterpiece Lord of Light
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| China's Handheld Electromagnetic Gun |
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'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.'
