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"On-line gaming environments are completely different things... Essentially it's massive global role-playing."
- Peter Watts
 |
| 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. |
| 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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'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
There's a lesson in this for neural net AI engineers everywhere.
