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"Does it open a new horizon for my thinking? Does it lead me to think new kinds of thoughts, that I would not otherwise perhaps have thought at all? These qualities are what [make] science fiction ...unique."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Amphibious Skimmer | ||
| Amphibious drone with blades. |
| "Here we go," said Kittiwake. "Any moment now." And there they were, breaking the surface, bobbing up out of the ocean. Skimmers. Moa turned her binoculars onto them, a trickle of chill sweat running down her spine. These were the things that had killed her father. At first, they seemed like smooth metal balls about two feet in diameter, with four red lenses that looked uncomfortably like eyes spaced around their upper hemisphere. As Moa watched, they rose a little way, until they were hovering a few inches above the water. They swivelled towards the drones that were speeding across the waves. "How many do you see?" Kittiwake asked. "Three?" "That's right. Three," Moa said. ...
They shot across the sea, raising fins of spume behind them. As they went, a multitude of blades unfolded from their round bodies and began to spin. By the time they reached the drones, each one was a whirling blur of sharp edges. They smashed into their targets like cannonballs, reducing them to splinters in moments. Then they sped off on a new course. Another drone was torn to shreds, throwing bits of wood in the air...and the Skimmers stopped, coming to a dead halt. ... |
| Technovelgy from Storm Thief,
by Chris Wooding. Published by Scholastic in 2006 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the Claws from Philip K. Dick's 1953 short story Second Variety and to the Wabbler from Murray Leinster's 1942 short story The Wabbler.
Thanks to Connor Lawrence for sharing this reference with us.
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Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
1900-1939
1940's 1950's
1960's 1970's
1980's 1990's
2000's 2010's
'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
