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"If you have a gut response to a story, you are not responding to something new ..you are really responding to a story you were told when you were six or seven…"
- Samuel R. Delany
 |
| Robomule | ||
| The robotic equivalent of a mule. |
| ...he might have paid more attention to his ploughing... and would have driven his furrow to the far side of the hill before the seductive music sounded along the road. But he did hear it and dropped the handles of the plough that was plugged into the robomule, turned and gaped. |
| Technovelgy from Bill the Galactic Hero,
by Harry Harrison. Published by Unknown in 1965 Additional resources -
|
You might compare the robomule to the more fully-featured robass from Anthony Boucher's 1951 story The Quest for Saint Aquin, as well as the more nimble dope mule from Bruce Sterling's 1994 novel Heavy Weather.
Compare to the automatic cultivators from Piracy Preferred (1930) by John W. Campbell, the conscious farm machines from The Hidden Colony (1935) by Otfrid von Hanstein, the robot farmer from The Turning Wheel (1954) by Philip K. Dick, the field minder from Who Can Replace A Man (1963) by Brian Aldiss, the self-guided tractor from At the Bottom of a Hole (1966) by Larry Niven, the robot crab from Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson and the agricultural robot pest controller from Runaway (1985) by Michael Crichton.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Bill the Galactic Hero
More Ideas
and Technology by Harry Harrison
Tech news articles related to Bill the Galactic Hero
Tech news articles related to works by Harry Harrison
Robomule-related
news articles:
- Kinze Autonomy Project's Autonomous Tractors
- Autonomous Tractor Harvest-Ready
| When Colds Threaten You Can't Do This - Or Can You? |
| MAI-Voice-2 Microsoft Text-To-Speech |
| Prufrock-MB2 Ready In Nashville |
| US Army IBEX Exoskeleton Walks Troops Out Of Danger |
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'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
'Then he became aware of a gentle pressure pushing him away from the ship.'
'And now they wre busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on...'
'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down...'
'Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence...'
'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.'
