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"It is change ... that is the dominant factor in society today... the world as it will be. This means that ... every man must take on a science fictional way of thinking.""
- Isaac Asimov
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| Office Hand | ||
| A robotic hand with each finger customized for a different function. |
Would you really want to be this efficient?
| ...the titanium weave and carbonic fibers of the dead man's prosthetic hand glimmered in the dim light that infused the alley unencumbered by the ancestral wistfulness of human skin.
It was work as fine and precise as Whispr had ever seen. The bonding of metal and carbon fiber to wrist bone, tendons and muscles was seamless... In addition to permitting basic grasping, each finger had been further customized to perform a different task, from airscribing to communications. The hand of the dead man had been turned into a veritable five-digited portable office. |
| Technovelgy from The Human Blend,
by Alan Dean Foster. Published by Del Rey in 2010 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the mechanical hand from Buck Rogers, 2430 AD (1929) by Philip Nowlan (w/D. Calkins), microhands from Microhands (Микроруки) (1931) by Boris Zhitkov, iron fingers from The Death's Head Meteor (1931) by Neil R. Jones, robot hands from The Iron World (1937) by Otis Adelbert Kline, waldoes from Waldo (1942) by Robert Heinlein, robot surgeon-hand from War Veteran (1955) by Philip K. Dick, robotic hand from The Door Into Summer (1956) by Robert Heinlein, interchangeable hands from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) by Philip K. Dick and the surgical hand from Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) by Philip K. Dick.
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'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
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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...'
