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"The first thing that's wrong with being a science-fiction writer today is that the present has caught up with the future and surpassed it."
- Peter Watts
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| Wandering Mine | ||
| A landmine with legs. |
| Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them, like in a sandy wash. And they settled down in the sand and rock, burying themselves, until sand covered them. And then you went away, and the enemy entered the area. And after a preset time, if nothing had crossed them, they dug themselves up, scuttled across the Kalahari on their crab legs, found a new place and buried themselves again. You could preset the range, bury a beacon to keep them fairly close - but the beacon could alert the enemy, so mostly they were set at random, set so as not to wander more then a couple of hundred meters from where they were first buried. |
| Technovelgy from Half the Day is Night,
by Maureen F. McHugh. Published by Tor in 1994 Additional resources -
|
As a munition, compare to the magnetic shell from The Great Stone of Shardis (1897) by Frank Stockton, the atomic bomb from The World Set Free (1914) by HG Wells, the atomic shell from Buck Rogers: 2430 AD (1929) by Nowlan and Calkin, the roving bomb from Lost Rocket (1941) by Manly Wade Wellman, the planet-busting bomb from Testing (1956) by JJ Ferat and the smart bullet from Runaway (1985) by Michael Crichton.
Thanks to Bob Yeager for submitting this item.
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| Russians Create Robot Tank Platoons |
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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
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'Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil...'
'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.'
