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"The first thing that's wrong with being a science-fiction writer today is that the present has caught up with the future and surpassed it."
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Although this was published relatively late in Heinlein's career, he wrote about this basic idea much earlier. In his original 1940 story Waldo, he described "tiny pixie hands" (waldoes) used for very fine work.
As far as I know, however, the idea of micro-surgery was first named and described by Raymond Z. Gallun in his 1939 short story Masson's Secret; see the entry for microsurgery tool.
Compare also to the microrobot from The Scarab (1936) by Raymond Z. Gallun, the ultra-microrobot from Menace in Miniature (1937) also by Gallun, waldo from Waldo (1942) by Robert Heinlein, the golden shuttles from The Mechanical Mice (1941) by Maurice Hugi, the autofac nanorobots from Autofac (1955) by Philip K. Dick, the nanomachine swarm from The Invincible (1954) by Stanislaw Lem, the Christmas Bush robot from Rocheworld by Robert Forward and the robot cells from Robot City (1987) by Michael Kube-McDowell. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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