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"I've been very obsessive about writing science fiction for far too many years. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have given up years ago."
- Charles Stross
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| Life Blanket | ||
| Sentient moss which, when draped over the shoulders of a human being, becomes fully self-aware, providing valuable services. |
On a distant planet circling Sigma Draco, vegetation strained towards self-awareness.
| For the aeons before the human beings came to this twilight world, the life blankets had dragged out a humdrum existence...
When the humans came, however, the blankets finally clicked. Between them and the men of Earth grew up a perfect mutual agreement, a highly profitable and agreeable form of symbiosis... For the man who wore one of them, like a cloak around his shoulders, need never worry where a meal was coming from; knew furthermore, that he would be fed correctly, with a scientific precision that automatically counterbalanced any upset of metabolism that might be brought about by alien conditions... The moment one of the blankets wrapped itself around a man it became, in a sense, the double of that man. It shared his intelligence and emotions... |
| Technovelgy from Ogre,
by Clifford Simak. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1944 Additional resources -
|
Here's what its like for the life blankets when they are left to their own devices, with no human being to care for:
Life blankets had other useful properties, like being able to heal some wounds in their hosts. They could also communicate with other plants to some extent.
These were predecessors of the hunting robes from his more famous 1961 novel Time is the Simplest Thing.
...he waddled out of the trading post upon his own high lonesome, flapping awkwardly along, like a sheet billowing in the breeze.
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Tech news articles related to Ogre
Tech news articles related to works by Clifford Simak
| What'll You Have? Extinct Animals Returned, Or Synthetic Eggshells? |
| Black Fungus Blocks Radiation |
| Lunar Biorepository Proposed For Cryo-Preservation Of Earth Species |
| Let's Make Slaver Sunflowers! Engineering Plants To Reflect Light |
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'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
