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"The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it."
- Larry Niven
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| Megadont | ||
| An engineered mastodon, used to convert vegetable matter into energy. |
How else will you wind up your kink-springs?
| Lalji and Shriram had been standing in the winding room of Ganesha Kinetic, watching a misplaced ton of SuperFlavor burn into joules. Shriram’s paired megodonts labored against the winding spindles, ponderous and steady as they turned just-consumed calories into kinetic energy and wound the shop’s main storage springs.
Priti and Bidi. The massive creatures barely resembled the elephants that had once provided their template DNA. Generippers had honed them to a perfect balance of musculature and hunger for a single purpose: to inhale calories and do terrible labors without complaint. The smell of them was overwhelming. |
| Technovelgy from The Calorie Man,
by Paolo Bacigalupi. Published by F&SF in 2005 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the power-wagons from Jack Vance's 1967 novel The Last Castle for an interesting inversion of this idea.
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Calorie Man
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and Technology by Paolo Bacigalupi
Tech news articles related to The Calorie Man
Tech news articles related to works by Paolo Bacigalupi
| Black Fungus Blocks Radiation |
| Lunar Biorepository Proposed For Cryo-Preservation Of Earth Species |
| Let's Make Slaver Sunflowers! Engineering Plants To Reflect Light |
| Machete-Wielding Philodendron Isn't Going To Take It Anymore |
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'It hurtled on down with inconceivable speed until it was visible as thousands of tiny robot planes...'
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'... another corner of his mind began to think about the shields.'
'Michel Ardan, as a Frenchman, was declared chief cook, an important function, which raised no rival.'
