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"Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together."
- Ray Bradbury
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| Autonomic Plow | ||
| A set of farm implements able to combine and perform as a weapon. |
| On the miniature TV screen Bunny Hentman was doing an act in which he played a German industrialist; wearing a blue, double-breasted suit, he was explaining to his board of directors how the new autonomic plows which their cartels were producing could be used for war. Four plows would guide themselves, upon news of hostilities, into a single unit; the single unit was not a larger plow, but a missile-launcher. |
| Technovelgy from Clans of the Alphane Moon,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Ace Books in 1964 Additional resources -
|
Delicious sarcasm from PKD; it derives from a passage in Isaiah:
In this case, peaceful plows become weapons.
The United States government promoted Operation Plowshare starting in 1962, which was an attempt to use nuclear explosives for excavation. Take a look at the Operation Plowshare video shown below; 12 million tons of earth were displaced, creating a crater 320 feet deep by 1280 feet wide.
They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.
Dick himself wrote about a world in which competing nations maintained a balance of power by thinking of an offensive weapon and then immediately "plowshare" them into consumer goods (see The Zap Gun).
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Clans of the Alphane Moon
More Ideas
and Technology by Philip K. Dick
Tech news articles related to Clans of the Alphane Moon
Tech news articles related to works by Philip K. Dick
Autonomic Plow-related
news articles:
- Grapevine Pruning Robot
| Worm Disrupts Physics Simulations Undetected For A Decade |
| Moscow Attacked By Hundreds Of Drones |
| China's Handheld Electromagnetic Gun |
| Is The Seattle Ultrasonics C-200 A Heinlein Vibroblade? |
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'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...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
