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"I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development."
- Arthur C. Clarke

Banning Gun  
  Shoots a pencil heat ray.  

A Banning gun spat its sizzling heat-ray, drilled Green and ended with a violet-red shower of sparks up on the metal dome-casing.


(Banning gun heat ray)

I saw the running figure heading sternward — and I didn’t miss. My heat-stab went through him, so clean and swift a drilled little hole that, though he was dead, his body of its own momentum seemed to keep on running with buckling legs.

Technovelgy from Voyage 13, by Ray Cummings.
Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1938
Additional resources -

Compare to the heat ray from War of the Worlds (1898) by HG Wells, the death-ray from The World Masters (1903) by George Griffiths, the short-wave surgical knife from Boomerang (1953) by Eric Frank Russell, the ray gun from The Black Star Passes (1930) by John W. Campbell, the pencil heat ray from Brigands of the Moon (1930) by Ray Cummings and the flesh gun from The Computer Connection (1974) by Alfred Bester.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Voyage 13
  More Ideas and Technology by Ray Cummings
  Tech news articles related to Voyage 13
  Tech news articles related to works by Ray Cummings

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