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"There's no point in making a mistake unless you understand the mistake so that you don’t make it again."
- Alfred Bester
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| Signal Skin | ||
| Natural communication form for this species; skin that can spell out text. |
The Dwellers are a long lived species - very long lived. "They lived slowly, evolved slowly, traveled slowly and did almost everything they ever did, slowly." They are the oldest species in the novel; they had been around for most of the life of the galaxy.
| Fassin opened the pane and let the creature in. It flipped inside, made a sign that was probably meant to be the Dweller equivalent of 'Shh!' and floated towards him, curling and cupping its body so that it formed a sickle shape, just a metre away from the prow of the arrowhead craft. Then, on its signal skin, now shielded from sight in all directions save that Fassin was watching from, it spelled out, OAZIL: MEET ME 2KM STRAIGHT DOWN, HOUR 5, RE. VALSEIR. |
| Technovelgy from The Algebraist,
by Iain M Banks. Published by Orbit in 2004 Additional resources -
|
Here's another quote that shows non-textual communication:
Compare to readout skin from John Varley's 1992 novel Steel Beach.
Slyne rocked back, staring at the older Dweller with patterns of betrayal and horror (non-mild) spreading across his signal skin.
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'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
'...it was all composed of tiny, identical cubes, carefully laid to form a tilelike surface.'
