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"At its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we can't predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe."
- John Brunner
 |
| 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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| IJOP Integrated Joint Operations Platform China's Minority Report? |
| Kuri Robot Roams Your Home, Taking Pictures |
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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'I'm afraid to tell you this Mr. Quaid, but you have suffered a schizoed embolism...'
'It drew its power from six square yards of sunpower screens on its low curved roof.'
'...lifted themselves to skimming flight upon whirling helicopters."
'Twenty rocket tugs towed it from its Earth hangar out into space.'
I don't need it to go fast, it just needs to amble along.
'The program raced up the screen one scan line at a time, subtly smoothing, deleting and coloring.'
