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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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| Metal Insects | ||
| Small autonomous flying winged robots. |
| Rohan had brought back a handful of the "metal insects" in his pocket. Nearly twenty-four hours had been spent examining the little "flies." ...The strictly symmetrical tripartite structures resembled the letter "Y." Three wings were anchored in a central thickening, each wing tapering to a point in its extremity. They looked coal black under direct illumination; but reflected light made them glisten bluish and olive green, not unlike the abdomens of certain terrestrial which are composed of tiny surfaces like the multifaceted rose cut of a diamond... These miniscule elements, one one-hundredth the size of a small grain of sand, formed an autonomous nervous system with a number of independent fibers. |
| Technovelgy from The Invincible,
by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Poland in 1954 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the metallic spider from The War of the Worlds (1898) by H.G. Wells, the scarab robot from The Scarab (1936) by Raymond Z. Gallun, the spider robot from The Mystery of Element 117 (1949) by Milton K. Smith, the mechanical hound from Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury, the Sheem spider robot from The Witches of Karres (1966) by James Schmitz, the spider tripod from Rendezvous With Rama (1972) by Arthur C. Clarke, the spider cable device from The Web Between the Worlds (1979) by Charles Sheffield, the spider robotic insects from Runaway (1985) by Michael Crichton and the recon spiders from Minority Report (Movie) (2002) by Steven Spielberg.
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More Ideas
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Tech news articles related to works by Stanislaw Lem
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'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
'...it was all composed of tiny, identical cubes, carefully laid to form a tilelike surface.'
