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"Science fiction is what scientists would do if they could - if they had enough grant money, enough time, and enough brains to do the wonderful things they would like to do."
- Greg Bear
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| Mite | ||
| A very small device (about the size of a dust mite) that has been manufactured for a particular purpose. |
I really enjoyed the way he wrote about nature and artifice in this passage. From the standpoint of the narrator, the creatures of the natural world and the tiny robots are on the same level.
| They found a lot of mites, of course, both natural and artificial. The natural ones looked like little crabs and had been quietly inhabiting the outer layers of other creatures bodies for hundreds of millions of years. The artificial ones had been developed in the past few decades. Most of them consisted of a spherical or ellipsoidal hull with various attachments. |
| Technovelgy from The Diamond Age,
by Neal Stephenson. Published by Bantam Books in 1995 Additional resources -
|
Mites are, of course, real creatures; they are tiny arachnids that consume bits of skin or other organic matter.
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| Natural Gait With Prosthetic Connected To Nervous System |
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
