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"In science fiction one can say a great many things that are unpalatable, … because it's expressed as science fiction you can slip it past their defenses."
- Frederik Pohl
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| 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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More Ideas
and Technology from The Diamond Age
More Ideas
and Technology by Neal Stephenson
Tech news articles related to The Diamond Age
Tech news articles related to works by Neal Stephenson
| Biological War: A Scenario |
| What'll You Have? Extinct Animals Returned, Or Synthetic Eggshells? |
| Black Fungus Blocks Radiation |
| Lunar Biorepository Proposed For Cryo-Preservation Of Earth Species |
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'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...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...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
