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"It was [H.G. Wells'] adolescent fiction, his imaginative stories, that live forever - and yet are not acknowledged in literature classes as being great literature. So to hell with the academics!"
- Greg Bear
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| Robotic Tail | ||
| A sleek coiled length of robotic segments. |
| The Wabbler went westward, with a dozen of its fellows, by night and in the belly of a sleek, swift-flying thing... The Wabbler lay in its place, with its ten-foot tail coiled neatly about its lower end...
The Wabbler hurtled downward through blackness... The Wabbler’s tail uncurled and writhed flexibly behind it.
Splash! The Wabbler plunged into the water...
It wabbled to one side and the other, straining, and presently its body was free, and a foot or two and then four or five feet of its tail — but it still writhed and wabbled spasmodically — and then suddenly it left the sea floor and floated free.
A long, long time afterward — years afterward — salvage divers finished cutting up the sunken warship for scrap. The last irregularly cut mass of metal went up on the salvage slings. The last diver down went stumbling about the muddy harbor water. His heavy, weighted shoes kicked up something. He fumbled to see if anything remained to be salvaged. He found a ten-foot, still flexible tail of metal. The rest of the Wabbler had ceased to exist. Chronometer, tide-time gear, valves, compressed-air tanks, and all the balance of its intricate inwards had been blown to atoms when the Wabbler achieved its destiny. Only the flexible metal tail remained intact. |
| Technovelgy from The Wabbler,
by Murray Leinster. Published by Street and Smith in 1942 Additional resources -
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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg.'
'... every veephone on the continent would display, over and over, two propositions.'
'Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil...'
'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.'
