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"[Science fiction] is the one literary medium left in which we have a free hand. We can do any damn thing we please."
- Alfred Bester
 |
| Dolphin's Hands | ||
| Digital prosthetic for dolphins. |
Once you've found out that dolphins are intelligent enough to perform useful tasks for humanity, what can you pay them with?
| “Oh. Well, if I said it with a small h you’d think I meant humans, wouldn’t you? Potential paranoids, albino crashlanders, boosterspice allergics, people with missing limbs and resistance to transplants — handicapped like that.” “Yah.” “Whereas what I deal with is sentient beings who evolved with minds but with nothing that would serve as hands.” “O-oh. Like dolphins?” “Right. Are there dolphins on Down?” “Hell, yes. What else would run our fishing industry?” “You know those things you pay them off in? They look like a squirt-jet motorboat motor with two padded metal hands attached.” “The Dolphin’s Hands. Sure. We sell ’em other stuff, tools and sonic things to move fish around, but Dolphin’s Hands are what they mainly need.” “I make them...”
“Well, don’t you see that there must be Handicapped species all over the galaxy? Minds but no hands. I tell you, Jilson, it gives me the shivers. For as long as we expand to other stars we’re going to meet more and more handless, toolless, helpless civilizations. Sometimes we won’t even recognize them. What are we going to do about them?” |
| Technovelgy from Handicap,
by Larry Niven. Published by Galaxy Science Fiction in 1967 Additional resources -
|
This is a precursor to the idea of Jones, the cyborg dolphin from William Gibson's 1981 short story Johnny Mnemonic.
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'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
'Midges have many capabilities. To the untrained eye, they look like sparrows.'
'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
