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"I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'Science Fiction' and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 |
| Vibratory Mass Penetrator | ||
| A device that allows a person to walk through earth and even solid rock. |
Rock Diver is a very striking short story; it describes a day in the life of a very special kind of prospector.
| The outcropping sheltered him as he fumbled for the switch at his side. A shrill whine built up in the steel box slung at his belt...Pete clambered up on the granite ledge that pushed up through the frozen ground.
He stood straight against the wind now, not feeling its pressure, the phantom snowflakes swirling through his body. Following the outcropping, he slowly walked into the ground. The top of his helmet bobbed for a second, like a bottle in the water, then sank beneath the surface of the snow. |
| Technovelgy from Rock Diver,
by Harry Harrison. Published by Hillman Periodicals in 1951 Additional resources -
|
This idea is described in The Microscopic Giants, a 1936 story by Paul Ernst. In the story, prospectors in Michigan's upper peninsula dig deeper than ever for copper, and find an incredible offshoot of the human race that walks through rocks:
... I can close my eyes and see the thing now; a manlike little figure walking board us through solid concrete. It bent forward as though shouldering a way against a sluggish tide, or a heavy wind; it moved as a deep-sea diver might move in clogging water. But that was all the resistance seemed to offer to it, that sluggish impediment to its forward movement.
Behind it there was a faint swirl of luminosity, like phosphorescent water moving in the trail of a tiny boat... the face was as human as ours...
The explanation given is that this race of humans had lived underground (and in ground) for so long that their bodies adapted to the tremendous pressure by becoming more dense.
As the faint, luminous spot in the concrete grew larger it also took recognizable form. And the form that appeared in the depths of the stuff was that of a human!
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| Marie Curie's Papers Still Radioactive |
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Science Fiction
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'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.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
