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"[Science fiction is ] That branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings."
- Isaac Asimov
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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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'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
'Midges have many capabilities. To the untrained eye, they look like sparrows.'
'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
