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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
 |
| Dornier | ||
| A small surveillance drone capable of hovering in midair. |
| And Angie fell to her knees in the sand, the sound of the surf crashing around her, dazzled by the sun. The Dornier was hovering nervously in front of her, two meters away. The pain receded instantly. She wiped her bloodied hands on the sleeves of the blue jacket. The remote's cluster of cameras whirred and rotated. "It's all right," she managed. "A nosebleed. It's only a nosebleed..." The Dornier darted forward, then back. "I'm going back to the house now. I'm fine." It rose smoothly out of sight. |
| Technovelgy from Mona Lisa Overdrive,
by William Gibson. Published by Bantam in 1988 Additional resources -
|
The name of this item is probably derived from an experimental vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) craft, the Dornier DO-31, manufactured in Germany in the late 1960's. These were not surveillance vehicles; they were intended for small team combat transport.
(Thanks to a reader for some background on this item.)
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'Hocus-pocus religions and archaic weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.'
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The Roujin Z system provides care to fully bedridden patients - and then some!
'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
