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"I kind of take it for granted that our great-grandchildren will regard us as a sort of precursor species. That they won't think of us as human and if we could see them, we probably wouldn't think of them as human either."
- William Gibson
 |
| Eavesdropper | ||
| Device to detect the presence of recording devices. |
| "...Should I discuss it in a restaurant?"
Anne turned the small, compact-like object around, so that he could see that it was in fact a meter of some sort. Its needle was in uncertain motion, but near the zero-point. "There's no mike close enough to pick you up," Anne said, snapping the device shut and restoring it to her purse. "Go ahead." "All right. Some day you're going to have to explain to me why you allowed yourself to get into that first fight with me here, when you had that Eavesdropper with you all the time." |
| Technovelgy from Cities in Flight,
by James Blish. Published by Avon in 1957 Additional resources -
|
Consider also anti-spying device from Isaac Asimov's 1951 novel Foundation or the vibration screen from Nat Schachner's 1937 story The Shiny One. Would Ray Cumming's eavesdropping ray from his 1931 novel Brigands of the Moon be able to counteract the Eavesdropper?
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'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
