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"One could imagine a very ascetic sort of life ... where the body is ignored. This is something I've played with in my books, where people hate to be reminded sometimes that they have bodies, they find it very slow and tedious."
- William Gibson
 |
| Office Hand | ||
| A robotic hand with each finger customized for a different function. |
Would you really want to be this efficient?
| ...the titanium weave and carbonic fibers of the dead man's prosthetic hand glimmered in the dim light that infused the alley unencumbered by the ancestral wistfulness of human skin.
It was work as fine and precise as Whispr had ever seen. The bonding of metal and carbon fiber to wrist bone, tendons and muscles was seamless... In addition to permitting basic grasping, each finger had been further customized to perform a different task, from airscribing to communications. The hand of the dead man had been turned into a veritable five-digited portable office. |
| Technovelgy from The Human Blend,
by Alan Dean Foster. Published by Del Rey in 2010 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the mechanical hand from Buck Rogers, 2430 AD (1929) by Philip Nowlan (w/D. Calkins), microhands from Microhands (Микроруки) (1931) by Boris Zhitkov, iron fingers from The Death's Head Meteor (1931) by Neil R. Jones, robot hands from The Iron World (1937) by Otis Adelbert Kline, waldoes from Waldo (1942) by Robert Heinlein, robot surgeon-hand from War Veteran (1955) by Philip K. Dick, robotic hand from The Door Into Summer (1956) by Robert Heinlein, interchangeable hands from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) by Philip K. Dick and the surgical hand from Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) by Philip K. Dick.
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'It sounds to me as though you had invented a kind of metal earthworm.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors that circulate around the satellite, making it habitable.'
'The steel tortoise gave MacKinnon a feeling of Crusoe- like independence.'
'...then back to their work, though little enough it was on these automatic cultivators.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
