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"I received a nice letter the other day from the Dalai Lama. He had read 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. It is about a computer at a Tibetan monastery."
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Very early use of the concept of a pocket-sized ray gun.
Nat Schachner used this term in his 1932 story Pirates of the Gorm:
Pemberton catapulted out of his berth like a flash. Not a moment too soon, either. A pale blue beam slithered across the blackness, impinged upon the pillow where his head had lain only a moment before. The air-cushion disintegrated into smoldering dust. Grant's weapon spat viciously. A hail of tiny bullets rattled against the panel, and exploded, each in a puffball of flame.
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 and the
flesh gun from The Computer Connection (1974) by Alfred Bester. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
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