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"At its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we can't predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe."
- John Brunner
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| Robobug | ||
| A cyborg insect. |
| Doyle swiveled in his chair, reached up to a shelf, and took down a clear plastic box that held a dragonfly clinging to a twig... The dragonfly had been turned into something called a HIMEMS... Ramirez and the others simply called them "robobugs."
...he opened the box, took out the twig and carefully placed the HIMEMS in the middle of a table. The hybrid dragonfly was a blue-eyed darner with a long body... and a tiny video lens. Slowly the insect moved its two pairs of wings... Doyle tapped his finger on the table, and the startled insect flew away. Doyle... activated the HIMEMS program on the computer. The first image on the monitor showed something dark, with a rough texture, and Doyle guessed that the dragonfly was resting on a tree branch. He attached a joystick to the computer and gently pushed the lever forward. The dragonfly responded like a toy airplane, taking off and heading east... He had learned to control the hybrids. You couldn't direct precise movements, but you could send the dragonfly in a general direction and then make it stop and hover... |
| Technovelgy from The Golden City,
by John Twelve Hawks. Published by Doubleday in 2009 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the the Roachster from Sparrowhawk. Philip K. Dick also deserves a mention for the commercial flies from his 1966 novel The Simulacra, and don't forget Jeff Noon's blurbflies from his 2000 novel Nymphomation.
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Robobug-related
news articles:
- Cyborg DragonflEye At Your Command
| FTC: Says Ring Employees Illegally Surveilled Customers |
| Perching Ambush Drones |
| India Ponders Always-On Smartphone Location Tracking |
| LingYuan Vehicle Roof Drones Now Available, ala Blade Runner 2049 |
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'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
