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"I wrote many novels which … contained the element of the projected collective unconscious, which made them simply incomprehensible to anyone who read them, because they required the reader to accept my premise that each of us lives in a unique world."
- Philip K. Dick
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| Symb | ||
| A symbiont life form that provides its human with life-giving energy. |
| Each human-symb pair is a closed ecology, requiring only sunlight and a small amount of solid matter to function. The vegetable symb gathers sunlight in space, using it to convert human waste and carbon dioxide into food and oxygen. At the same time it protects the fragile human from vacuum and the extremes of heat and cold. The symb's body extends into the lungs and through the alimentary canal. Each side feeds the other.
...upon permeating the nervous system of its host, [the symb] is born as a thinking being. It shares the human brain. |
| Technovelgy from The Ophiuchi Hotline,
by John Varley. Published by Quantum Science Fiction in 1977 Additional resources -
|
Compare this idea with that of the star stone from Roger Zelazny's still-amazing 1976 novel Doorways in the Sand as well as the aliens from Robert Heinlein's 1951 novel The Puppet Masters.
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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.'
