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"I've come across more and more people who've actually tried reading science fiction and can't make it make sense."
- Samuel R. Delany
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| Smart Rope | ||
| Long 'rope' consisting of a variety of intertwined cables with different properties; controlled with special glove interface. |
| ...The cable weighed only a couple of kilos, but it felt bizarrely serpentine and supple, somehow dry and greasy at the same time. It was as thick as his little finger, and maybe twenty meters long. "What is this thing exactly?"
"Smart rope." "What's smart about it?" "Well, there's this chip in the battery box that understands knot topology... It's a kind of math about deforming the geometry of space... Anyway, that rope is braided from a lot of different cabling. Got sensor cable, power cable, and this is the tricky part electric reactive fiber. Okay? It'll stretch, it'll contract - hard and fast - it can bend and wiggle anywhere along the length. The damn thing can tie itself in knots..." |
| Technovelgy from Heavy Weather,
by Bruce Sterling. Published by Bantam in 1994 Additional resources -
|
Here's a description of the smart rope in use.
Alex pulled the coil of smart rope from his shoulder, put his gloved hand on it. The thin black rope slid out instantly across the bubblepak flooring, reared like a cobra, seized the end of the vise grip in its metal-collared noose, and lifted the tool into the air. It then swayed across the floor, the vise grip dangling gently from the noose, and hung the tool in midair, within her easy reach.
Thanks to Bob for pointing this one out.
"Can you reach me that big-ass vise grip over there?"
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'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.'
