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"This category [science fiction] excludes rocket ships that make U-turns, serpent men of Neptune that lust after human maidens, and stories by authors who flunked their Boy Scout merit badge tests in descriptive astronomy."
- Robert Heinlein
 |
| Anti-Spying Device | ||
| Foolproof means of defending against spy beams. |
| It was not a large office, but it was quite spy-proof and quite undetectably so. Spy-beams trained upon it received neither a suspicious silence nor an even more suspicious static. They received, rather, a conversation constructed at random out of a vast stock of innocuous phrases in various tone and voices. |
| From Foundation,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Doubleday in 1951 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the cone of silence From Cease Fire (1958) by Frank Herbert, hush corner by Robert Heinlein in Double Star and the Fenton Silencer from an early Arthur C. Clarke story.
The earliest example I know of is the isolation barrage from Wandl, The Invader (1939) by Ray Cummings.
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- Is Privacy Too Expensive?
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| Kuri Robot Roams Your Home, Taking Pictures |
| Nuclear Drones Could Fly For Years |
| China's Drone Fleet Flies In Formation |
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'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
There's a lesson in this for neural net AI engineers everywhere.
