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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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| Soft Speaker | ||
| A device that sends a tightly-controlled beam of sound. |
Just another one of Dr. Methuen's prankster inventions. Here's how it went down:
"Beware, John Duggan! Your sins will find you out!" ...there was nobody within fifty feet of him.
In this case, "pixillation" refers to "pixie" + "lation." And how was it done?
The next man to suspect that the Yale campus was undergoing a severe pixillation was John Duggan, the tall thin one of the two campus cops. He was passing Christ Church ... a still small voice spoke in his ear.
| ".. There's the soft-speaker, for instance --"
"What's that?" "It's like a loud-speaker, only it doesn't speak loudly. It throws a supersonic beam, modulated by the human voice to give the effect of audible sound frequencies when it hits the human ear. Since you can throw a supersonic beam almost as accurately as you can throw a light beam, you can turn the soft speaker on a person, who will then hear a still small voice in his ear apparently coming from nowhere." |
| Technovelgy from The Exhalted,
by L. Sprague de Camp. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1940 Additional resources -
|
Dr. Methuen has additional uses in mind, with some modifications to the original device.
Original quote contributed by Harold Miller - thanks!
Compare to the green bullet from Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 or the raisin from Bart Kosko's 1987 novel Noontime.
I knocked together an improved sound speaker. This one'll work through masonry walls. I'm going to put all the undergraduates to sleep and tell'em they're monkeys... They're practically monkeys to begin with, so it shouldn't be difficult."
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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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...'
