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"[Science fiction] is the one literary medium left in which we have a free hand. We can do any damn thing we please."
- Alfred Bester
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| Stimtab | ||
| A drug designed to keep the user awake and alert for long periods. |
| We were each allowed one stimtab. Without it, no one could have marched an hour. A second pill would have been welcome after the edge had started to wear off, but the mathematics of the situation forbade it; we were still thirty klicks from the enemy base, fifteen hours marching at the least. And though you could stay awake and energetic for a hundred hours on the tabs, aberrations of judgment and perception snowballed after the second one, until in extremis the most bizarre hallucinations would be taken at face value, and a person could fidget for hours deciding whether to have breakfast. |
| Technovelgy from The Forever War,
by Joe Haldeman. Published by Not Known in 1974 Additional resources -
|
Haldeman is obviously not the first person to think about this. The Nazis blitzkrieg into France and Poland was accomplished in part with the use of Pervitin, an amphetamine.
Haldeman uses the idea of stimtabs to describe and extend this idea; the U.S. Army used amphetamines in Vietnam.
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Forever War
More Ideas
and Technology by Joe Haldeman
Tech news articles related to The Forever War
Tech news articles related to works by Joe Haldeman
Stimtab-related
news articles:
- Hacking The Mind Of The Soldier
| Bacteria Turns Plastic Into Pain Relief? That Gives Me An Idea. |
| Heart Patches Grown In The Lab Repair Hearts |
| Pixel Watch 'Loss of Pulse Detection' And Philip K. Dick |
| ErythroMer Artificial Blood |
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
