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"...the elements of cyberpunk have dissolved into the whole SF genre, so it’s hard to find anyone writing who doesn’t owe serious debts to Gibson and his crew."
- Richard Morgan
 |
| Pencil Beam | ||
| A thin tube-like laser beam weapon. |
| Pitt slid into his car, and snapping on the dashboard mike, called his highest ranking superior, the South American Director. They were moving fast, now, filling up the street and surging silently toward him. They had, no doubt, identified him by his T-class clothes-white shirt and tie, gray suit, felt hat. Brief case. The shine of his black shoes. The pencil beam gleaming in the breast pocket of his coat. He undipped the gold tube and held it ready. "Emergency," he said...
The car tipped ominously; they were lifting it up on one side, trying to overturn it. Both back windows were out. A man's hand reached for the door release. Pitt burned the hand to ash with his pencil beam. The stump frantically withdrew. "I got one." "If you could scan some of them for us ..." More hands appeared. The interior of the car was sweltering; the heat drill was almost through. "I hate to do this." Pitt turned his pencil beam on his brief case until there was nothing left. Hastily, he dissolved the contents of his pockets, everything in the glove compartment, his identification papers, and finally he burned his wallet... |
| Technovelgy from Vulcan's Hammer,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Ace Books in 1956 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the pencil heat ray from Brigands of the Moon (1930), by Ray Cummings, the force-field penknife from Isaac Asimov's 1951 novel Foundation and the force pencil from Gather Darkness (1943) by Fritz Lieber.
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
