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"I am first of all not a science fiction writer … I write, I suppose, what the Latin Americans call magic realism."
- Harlan Ellison
 |
| Wandering Mine | ||
| A landmine with legs. |
| Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them, like in a sandy wash. And they settled down in the sand and rock, burying themselves, until sand covered them. And then you went away, and the enemy entered the area. And after a preset time, if nothing had crossed them, they dug themselves up, scuttled across the Kalahari on their crab legs, found a new place and buried themselves again. You could preset the range, bury a beacon to keep them fairly close - but the beacon could alert the enemy, so mostly they were set at random, set so as not to wander more then a couple of hundred meters from where they were first buried. |
| Technovelgy from Half the Day is Night,
by Maureen F. McHugh. Published by Tor in 1994 Additional resources -
|
And then it had scuttled out into the desert.
As a munition, compare to the magnetic shell from The Great Stone of Shardis (1897) by Frank Stockton, the atomic bomb from The World Set Free (1914) by HG Wells, the atomic shell from Buck Rogers: 2430 AD (1929) by Nowlan and Calkin, the roving bomb from Lost Rocket (1941) by Manly Wade Wellman, the planet-busting bomb from Testing (1956) by JJ Ferat and the smart bullet from Runaway (1985) by Michael Crichton.
Thanks to Bob Yeager for submitting this item.
Once, one of his men had been sleeping out on patrol, and he had woken because he heard a scuttling. He’d thought scorpion, and froze. And out of the sand rose a wandering mine. Faceless little thing on six legs, with sand trickling off it like water as it rose. It had stood, and he had known that if it came towards him, he might set it off by being an obstacle. He was afraid to call out, some of them homed in on noise. He couldn’t even warn the others.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Half the Day is Night
More Ideas
and Technology by Maureen F. McHugh
Tech news articles related to Half the Day is Night
Tech news articles related to works by Maureen F. McHugh
Wandering Mine-related
news articles:
- Sleeper Drones Lie in Wait
| Sleeper Drones Lie in Wait |
| Worm Disrupts Physics Simulations Undetected For A Decade |
| Moscow Attacked By Hundreds Of Drones |
| China's Handheld Electromagnetic Gun |
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'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.'
'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...'
