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"[Science fiction] is the only kind of writing that allows you to look at the world we live in and change one piece at a time."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Robotic Undersea Turtle | ||
| A sea-going robot that resembles a turtle. |
| It stirred among shadows, behind a squat cylinder topped with the usual black-and-mirror plates. Perhaps three feet long, six or eight inches high... It came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal. A latticework swiveled at the front end like a miniature radioradar beamcaster. Something glinted beadily beneath, twin lenses? Two thin tentacles held a metal silver off one of the great stationary structures. They fed it into an orifice, and sparks shot back upward-
 (Robot turtle from 'Epilogue' (1962) by Poul Anderson) "Holy Moses," Kuroki whispered. The thing stopped in its tracks. The front-end lattice swung toward the humans. Then the thing was off, unbelievably fast. In half a second there was nothing to see. Nobody moved for almost a minute. Finally Frederika clutched Darkington's arm with a little cry. The rigidness left him and he babbled of experimental robot turtles in the early days of cybernetic researchvery simple gadgets. A motor drove a wheeled platform, steered by a photoelectric unit that approached light sources by which the batteries might be recharged and, when this was done, became negatively phototropic and sought darkness. An elementary feedback circuit. But the turtles had shown astonishing tenacity, had gone over obstacles or even around... "That beast there was a good deal more complicated..." |
| Technovelgy from Epilogue,
by Poul Anderson. Published by Analog in 1962 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the Robofish (Mitsubishi Robot Turbot) from Slow Life (2002) by Michael Swanwick.
Thanks to Bruce P for pulling this item out of his memory.
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and Technology from Epilogue
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Tech news articles related to Epilogue
Tech news articles related to works by Poul Anderson
| Origin F1 Humanoid Robot's Facial Skin |
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| Blue Collar AI Goes To Work To Mine Its Own Crypto |
| HandelBot Helps Two-Handed Robots Learn Piano |
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'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
'I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh.'
'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
