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"The first thing that's wrong with being a science-fiction writer today is that the present has caught up with the future and surpassed it."
- Peter Watts
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| Personal Smelter | ||
| A device used to reduce metallic objects (like coins, pots, cables) to an ingot with known value. |
You can readily judge a society by the objects that are commonplace among its people. In this near future America (as seen in 1975), recycling is part of the culture.
| There was a stack of over fifty copper dollars, worth three hundred to any electronics firm, asteroid ores being poor in high-conduction metals. It was illegal to sell currency for scrap, but everybody did it, saying they'd found old saucepans in the attic of a secondhand house, or a disused cable while digging over the back yard. He tipped the coins into his smelter without counting them because only the weight of the eventual ingot mattered. |
| Technovelgy from The Shockwave Rider,
by John Brunner. Published by Harper and Row in 1975 Additional resources -
|
Smelters use a great deal of energy; in the non-sf world, a "small" smelter is one that takes the material from just one mine.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Shockwave Rider
More Ideas
and Technology by John Brunner
Tech news articles related to The Shockwave Rider
Tech news articles related to works by John Brunner
Personal Smelter-related
news articles:
- Your Scrap Copper Future
| 'Mooncrete' Lunar Regolith Concrete (LRC) |
| Harvard Metamaterials Change Structure Instantly |
| Nano-Chainmail 2D Mechanically Interlocked Polymer |
| Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick |
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'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...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...'
