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"The world is really so surreal these days that it's necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. The artist functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are."
- William Gibson
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| Tentacle Machines | ||
| Enormous robots, cylindrical of body, tentacular of arms, autonomous of brain, sinister of intent. |
Slave robots of an artificial intelligence.
| He wrote of the tentacle-machines and claimed that they were merely machines, without any trace of brain or intelligence, simply complex, automatic, and self-powered mechanism that were controlled by the metal brain, perhaps by some intricate form of radio-control. But he wrote also of a thing he had not seen on his first glimpse of the clearing, and that was the existence of the cylinders, as he called them throughout. They were just that, gleaming cylinders of metal, some fifty feet in diameter and half again as much in height, provided with two flexible arms on the same principle as the arms of the metal brain and the tentacles of the working-machines, but much larger and longer.
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| Technovelgy from The Metal Giants,
by Edmond Hamilton. Published by Weird Tales in 1926 Additional resources -
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'...great rectangular slabs of muscle, slung into a rectangular frame.'
'If the biological robots were not living creatures, they were certainly very good imitations.'
"Everybody and his dog, it seemed, wanted to live out in the country; transportation and communication were no longer isolating factors."
'... the new typewriter that could be talked to, and which transposed the spoken sound into typed words.'
'... underneath they consisted of networks of cooling tubes against the skin.'
