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"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Mercy Rifle | ||
| Device fired slivers of anesthetic as darts. |
| The goggled figure in front of the camp tent was cleaning a mercy rifle. By the time we were out of the car, he had closed it up and loaded it with inch-long slivers of anesthetic chemical. The slivers could be fired individually or in one-second bursts of twenty, and they dissolved instantly in anything that resembled blood. One type of sliver would usually fit all the lifeforms on a given world. |
| Technovelgy from Grendel,
by Larry Niven. Published by Ballantine in 1968 Additional resources -
|
Compare this idea to the needle pipe from the 1928 novel Beyond the Stars by Ray Cummings.
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'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
