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"[Science fiction] has become big business, where books are merchandised and promoted and distributed and placed on sale like slabs of bacon or cans of soup."
- Frederik Pohl
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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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'As though a switch had been turned off, the pain stopped...'
'At the ringside opposite them a table had been removed to make room for a large transparent plastic capsule on wheels.'
'... he realized that the moving thing inside was - of course - a robot.'
'Not since the time he rewired the delivery robot...'
'The spotter descends, and we think it searches the vicinity, looking for the victim’s face...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs. Four mechanical arms welded right onto his body. What are the odds?'
