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"I went back to science fiction to try a few experiments …and my first experiment was a disaster…"
- Alfred Bester
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| Message Tree | ||
| A tree growing out of a huge cliff of crystal provides communication for a world. |
The message tree is a remarkable and creative idea, particularly in the context of the novel. The planet Lithia has virtually no naturally occurring metals on the surface and electrical power is extremely difficult to generate; how can you recreate electronic communications equipment? The answer lies in the piezoelectric effect.
| If the night were to turn out to be especially windy, there would doubtless be many voices coming and going to the Message Tree. It loomed ahead of him now, a Sequoialike giant... As the winds came and went... the tree nodded and swayed. With every movement, the tree's root system ... tugged and distorted the buried crystalline cliff upon which the city had been founded. At every such pressure, the buried cliff responded with a vast heart-pulse of radio waves - a pulse detectable not only all over Lithia, but far out into space as well. |
| Technovelgy from A Case of Conscience,
by James Blish. Published by If in 1953 Additional resources -
|
This sort of message device also lent itself well to the story; the world of Lithia was one in which the biosphere was seen as important by the indigenous sapient life.
The piezoelectric effect was discovered by one of more of the Curies around 1880; it is the voltage produced between surfaces of a solid nonconducting substance (dielectric) when mechanical stress is applied.
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Tech news articles related to A Case of Conscience
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news articles:
- Tweeting Tree Like Blish's Message Tree
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| EBS-260 Handjet Free Hand Dot Matrix Printer |
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'You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard...'
''OVERRIDE,' the City Fathers said suddenly, without being asked anything at all.'
'... they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.'
'... the expressionless face before me was therefore that of the golem-wrestler, Rolem, a creature that could be set for five times the strength of a human being.'
'Waldo put his arms into the primary pair before him; all three pairs, including the secondary pair mounted before the machine, came to life.'
'... the glittering little rocket bolted to the black iron behind him.'
'The slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector...'
