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"The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it."
- Larry Niven
 |
| Neodog | ||
| Canine-derived animal, genetically engineered for increased intelligence and speech. |
Neodogs are used by the Terran Federation on K9 Corps, paired with a human.
| "They talk. You simply have to train your ear to their accent. Their mouths can't shape 'b', 'm', 'p', or 'v' and you have to get used to their equivalents...their speech is as clear as any human speech. But a neodog is not a talking dog; he is not a dog at all, he is an artificially mutated symbiote derived from dog stock. A neo...is about six times as bright as a dog, say about as intelligent as a human moron..."
"...Can you imagine being married to a Caleb?" "Huh? No. No, I can't." "The emotional relationship between the dog-man and the man-dog in the K-9 team is a great deal closer and much more important than is the emotional relationship in most marriages." |
| From Starship Troopers,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1959 Additional resources -
|
The bond in a K-9 team is so close, if the human is killed, the Neodog is euthanized. However, if the Neodog is killed, the human would have to hospitalized and rehabilitated. This may be the earliest reference to Bond Creatures, in which humans have a close relationship with an alien lifeform. Such examples can be seen in Honor Harrington (Treecats), Humanx Commonwealth (Flinx and Pip), the anime Digimon, and Dragonriders of Pern series.
Thanks to Gatomon41 for contributing this item.
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Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
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'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
There's a lesson in this for neural net AI engineers everywhere.
