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"Generally, the human race avoids doing anything radical until forced into it."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Freedom Machine | ||
| A birth control device developed using nanotechnology. |
Most of the devices that work with human reproduction are either very simple devices that impose a barrier between the sperm and the egg (which require some element of foresight to use), or they manipulate hormones, which has a number of side-effects.
| ...she had been using something called a Freedom Machine - a mite that lived in your womb and caught eggs and ate them. |
| Technovelgy from The Diamond Age,
by Neal Stephenson. Published by Bantam Books in 1995 Additional resources -
|
Stephenson proposes a very tiny machine that would live inside of a woman's fallopian tube and grab each egg that came along before it had the chance to encounter any sperm cells that might be passing by. Assuming that the nanomachine was well-trained, and didn't start attacking other cells that passed by, this could work.
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Timeline
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'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
