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"The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. You look at the world around you, and take it apart into its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Needle Pipe | ||
| A device that could project slivers of metal at near light speed. |
| The electronic needle pipe was a foot-long metallic pipe with a diameter the size of a small human finger. It had a large, round metallic base, to be operated with two hands.
It projected a very small stream of electrons, which carried with them a tiny, sharp-pointed fragment of metal, like a needle. But when it struck it solidified. There was a range finder for aiming, and a device for curving the electronic stream, so that the beam could be sent around almost any degree of curvature. |
| Technovelgy from Beyond the Stars,
by Ray Cummings. Published by Ace in 1928 Additional resources -
|
David Gerrold, in his War Against the Chtorr novels of the 1980's, wrote about something very similar to this. It was a gun that sprayed (I think electromagnetically) thousands of stainless steel needles per minute. See AMD Needle Rifle from A Matter for Men (1983) by David Gerrold.
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Timeline
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'Hocus-pocus religions and archaic weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.'
'Oscar picked up a trowel. 'I'm the tool for the mortar,' the little trowel squeaked cheerfully.'
'... he waited for the robotrix attendant to finish fueling up his ship.'
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.'
