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"It's hard to tell stories about critters that are not human. John W. Campbell tried it, in "Twilight," and everybody says it's a wonderful story, and nobody ever reads it twice."
- Jerry Pournelle
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| Great Ear | ||
| An electronic telepathic listening device that monitors thousands of people simultaneously. |
| Well, the Great Ear experiment is just rolling merrily along, he thought sardonically as he read:
Thought to be beyond the scope of probability, work on the first purely electronic telepathic listening device advances at a reassuring rate, officials of McMally Corporation, the designer and builder of Great Ear, as it has come to be called, said today in a press conference attended by many skeptical observers. "When Great Ear goes into operation," Munro Capp opined, "it will be capable of telepathically monitoring the thought-waves of tens of thousands of persons, and with the ability - not found among Unusuals - to unscramble the enormous flood-tides of... |
| From Our Friends From Frolix 8,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Ace Publishing in 1970 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the espionage machine, a device for monitoring the thoughts of a single individual, from No, No, Not Rogov, a 1958 cold war classic short by Cordwainer Smith.
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'A worker replaced by a nubot... had to be compensated.'
'... forcing the energy transfer which allowed him to regrow his lost fingers.'
'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
