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"SF is a controlled way to think and dream about the future."
- Gregory Benford
 |
| Paralyzing Gun | ||
| Renders senseless any human in its path. |
| Vince Southern's handsome features twisted into a sneer of contempt. He didn't land at once in the clearly marked area beside the building. Instead he guided his craft low over the observatory, sweeping the latter with a wide beam of powerful waves from a paralyzer gun. Anyone inside the structure would be temporarily rendered senseless. |
| Technovelgy from The Achilles Heel,
by Raymond Z. Gallun. Published by Amazing Stories in 1940 Additional resources -
|
The gun "disorganized the functions of brain and nervous centers".
Compare to the paralysis bomb from If This Goes On... (1940) by Robert Heinlein and the paralysis ray from Satellite Five (1938) by Arthur K. Barnes. Also, compare to Heinlein's paralysis bomb from Methuselah's Children (1941), the paralyzing eye from L. Sprague de Camp's The Best Laid Scheme (1941), the paralyzing ray from Ray Cumming's Blood of the Moon (1936), the paralyzing cone from The Atomic Conquerors by Edmond Hamilton (1927) and the para-beam from EC Tubbs' Mechanical Monarch (1958).
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
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'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
