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"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket."
- George Orwell
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| Symb | ||
| A symbiont life form that provides its human with life-giving energy. |
| Each human-symb pair is a closed ecology, requiring only sunlight and a small amount of solid matter to function. The vegetable symb gathers sunlight in space, using it to convert human waste and carbon dioxide into food and oxygen. At the same time it protects the fragile human from vacuum and the extremes of heat and cold. The symb's body extends into the lungs and through the alimentary canal. Each side feeds the other.
...upon permeating the nervous system of its host, [the symb] is born as a thinking being. It shares the human brain. |
| From The Ophiuchi Hotline,
by John Varley. Published by Quantum Science Fiction in 1977 Additional resources -
|
Compare this idea with that of the star stone from Roger Zelazny's still-amazing 1976 novel Doorways in the Sand as well as the aliens from Robert Heinlein's 1951 novel The Puppet Masters.
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| Baubotanik - Construction Botany - Builds Bridges |
| Mice Gestate In Mechanical Womb |
| Worlds With Underground Oceans More Conducive To Life |
| Monkey Gets A Bigger Brain, Thanks To Human Gene |
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'... iron tubes... the ends of the tubes were joined to each other...to preserve it from the action of the seawater.'
'Mr. Garden, you are in no condition to drive....'
'A cable, here, from the controller to the interface plug... wires from that to the brain.'
'The slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector...'
'Holodeck 4 was waiting to be programmed...'
'... he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'I stood in line for half an hour for this, and it's just a blob!'
