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"Generally, the human race avoids doing anything radical until forced into it."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Freedom Machine | ||
| A birth control device developed using nanotechnology. |
Most of the devices that work with human reproduction are either very simple devices that impose a barrier between the sperm and the egg (which require some element of foresight to use), or they manipulate hormones, which has a number of side-effects.
| ...she had been using something called a Freedom Machine - a mite that lived in your womb and caught eggs and ate them. |
| Technovelgy from The Diamond Age,
by Neal Stephenson. Published by Bantam Books in 1995 Additional resources -
|
Stephenson proposes a very tiny machine that would live inside of a woman's fallopian tube and grab each egg that came along before it had the chance to encounter any sperm cells that might be passing by. Assuming that the nanomachine was well-trained, and didn't start attacking other cells that passed by, this could work.
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'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
'I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh.'
'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
