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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
 |
| Metal Insects | ||
| Small autonomous flying winged robots. |
| Rohan had brought back a handful of the "metal insects" in his pocket. Nearly twenty-four hours had been spent examining the little "flies." ...The strictly symmetrical tripartite structures resembled the letter "Y." Three wings were anchored in a central thickening, each wing tapering to a point in its extremity. They looked coal black under direct illumination; but reflected light made them glisten bluish and olive green, not unlike the abdomens of certain terrestrial which are composed of tiny surfaces like the multifaceted rose cut of a diamond... These miniscule elements, one one-hundredth the size of a small grain of sand, formed an autonomous nervous system with a number of independent fibers. |
| Technovelgy from The Invincible,
by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Poland in 1954 Additional resources -
|
If you like these litle guys, check out the scarab mechanical insect from a 1936 story by Raymond Z. Gallun.
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Tech news articles related to The Invincible
Tech news articles related to works by Stanislaw Lem
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| Micro-Robots Are Smallest, Fully Functional |
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'You are who we say you are, Dr. Dakin,' Turner said.'
'It's area, and its consequent light-gathering capacity, was many times greater than any rigid mirror...'
'Tell me your torments,' the Padre said, in an elderly voice marked with compassion.
'...a slender-legged tripod surmounted by a spherical body no larger than a football.'
'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
'The area affected was five hundred kilometres across, and perfectly circular.'
