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"The world is really so surreal these days that it's necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. The artist functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are."
- William Gibson
 |
| 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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'If the biological robots were not living creatures, they were certainly very good imitations.'
"Everybody and his dog, it seemed, wanted to live out in the country; transportation and communication were no longer isolating factors."
'... the new typewriter that could be talked to, and which transposed the spoken sound into typed words.'
'... underneath they consisted of networks of cooling tubes against the skin.'
'My cars talk to one another. I have no doubt about it...'
'... the imprint of her image on the telephoto cell.'
