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"If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Brain Machine | ||
| Powerful mechanical computer. |
| His puzzled glance moved past the funnel, and paused understanding on the great machine of cogs and rollers and levers and tracing styluses flush against the quartz wall of the space unit. He had seen such brain machines before, though on a much simpler scale. Through the aid of their remarkable wizardry the most complex, the most abstruse mathematical problems could be solved in the course of minutes — problems that otherwise might have taken weary months of calculations, problems even that were unsolvable by the human brain. It was the brain machine that had made possible the reduction of the universe to a single equation, that had rendered interplanetary flight a matter of piercing the space-warp continuum, instead of the infinitely slow communication along the normal gravitational world lines; and it had created a mathematics of its own that even Warren Moorhouse himself, the greatest mathematician of the system, could not follow. |
| Technovelgy from The Eternal Wanderer,
by Nat Schachner. Published by 1936 in Astounding Additional resources -
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'Our planes are going to start bringing in bales of discarded plastics...'
'... completely forgetting the ship at sight of the awesome figure and great head of the giant Gaut...'
'So, Ender, we will now begin your education.'
'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
