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"I've been very obsessive about writing science fiction for far too many years. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have given up years ago."
- Charles Stross
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| Novel Movement for Humanoid Robot | ||
| A robot has human form, but it is able to move like no human being ever born. |
Deirdre was an exceptional actress - until her body was virtually destroyed in a fire. Maltzer was a brilliant engineer, who wrought better than he knew. All that was left of her was her brain, encased in a robot's body.
He had envisioned many shapes. Great, lurching robot forms, cylindrical, with hinged arms and legs...
she had no face. She had only a smooth, delicately modeled ovoid for her head, with a . . . a sort of crescent-shaped mask across the frontal area where her eyes would have been if she had needed eyes...
Her arms were pale shining gold, tapered smoothly, without modeling, and flexible their whole length in diminishing metal bracelets fitting one inside the other clear down to the slim, round wrists. The hands were more nearly human than any other feature about her, though they, too, were fitted together in delicate, small sections that slid upon one another with the flexibility almost of flesh. The fingers’ bases were solider than human, and the fingers themselves tapered to longer tips...
And then she showed off what movements were possible for her robot body.
“Come and look at me, John,” she said...
(Deidre seated in 'No Woman Born' by C.L. Moore))
| I can still give them what I always gave, only now with greater variations and more depths than I’d ever have done before. Why, look — ” She gave a little wriggle of excitement.
“You know the arabesque principle — getting the longest possible distance from fingertip to toe tip with a long, slow curve through the whole length? And the brace of the other leg and arm giving contrast? Well, look at me. I don’t work on hinges now. I can make every motion a long curve if I want to. My body’s different enough now to work out a whole new school of dancing... Now she swayed and came slowly down the steps, moving with a suppleness just a little better than human. The swaying strengthened. By the time she reached the stage floor she was dancing. But it was no dance that any human creature could ever have performed. The long, slow, languorous rhythms of her body would have been impossible to a figure hinged at its joints as human figures hinge. (Harris remembered incredulously that he had feared once to find her jointed like a mechanical robot. But it was humanity that seemed, by contrast, jointed and mechanical now...)
 (Deidre posing in 'No Woman Born' by C.L. Moore))
And as a glowing cigarette tip in the dark describes closed circles before the eye when the holder moves it swiftly, so Deirdre blazed in one continuous flash of golden motion across the room...
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| Technovelgy from No Woman Born,
by C.L. Moore. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1944 Additional resources -
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'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
'...the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and Then one toppled and fell. Then another.'
'Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space...'
'The men are dead, but their acquired wisdom lives on and I am the beneficiary.'
'Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting.'
'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
