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"the [science fiction] writer should be able to convince the reader (and himself) that the wonders he is describing really can come true...and that gets tricky when you take a good, hard look at the world around you."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Sandtrout Glove | ||
| A living glove, formed of live creatures. |
Another of the unique creations of Frank Herbert.
| The sandtrout glove. It was the play of children. If one held a sandtrout in the hand, smoothing it over your skin, it formed a living glove. Traces of blood in the skin's capillaries could be sensed by the creatures, but something mingled with the bloods water repelled them. Sooner or later, the glove with slip off into the sand, there to be lifted into a space fiber basket. The spice sue them until they were dumped into the death still.
Ledo groped on the sand with his right hand until his fingers and countered the leathery skin of a sandtrout. It was the large one he had expected. The creature didn't try to invade him, but moved eagerly onto his flash. He explored it's outline with his free hand roughly diamond shaped. It had no head, no extremities, no eyes, yet it could find water unerringly. With the fellows you could join body to body, locking one on another by the course interlacings of extruded celia until the whole became one large sack-organism enclosing the water ... The sandtrout squirm down his hand, elongating, stretching. He felt the sandtrout becoming thin, covering more and more of his hand. No sandtrout had ever before in counter to hand such as this one, every cell supersaturated with space. No other human has ever lived before and reasoned in such a condition. Ledo felt the sandtrout growth in, spreading itself over more and more of his hand, reaching up his arm. He located another, placed it over the first one. Contact ignited a frenzied squirming in the creatures. There celia locked and they became a single membrane which enclosed him to the elbow. The sandtrout adjusted to the living glove of childhood play, but thinner and more sensitive as he lured it into the role of a skin symbiont. |
| Technovelgy from Children of Dune,
by Frank Herbert. Published by Putnam in 1976 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the equally unlikely poison-bearing invisible glove from Lies, Inc. (1964) by Philip K. Dick.
Compare, if you like, these almost entirely dissimilar items:
the hinged mittens (for space suits) from The Bluff of the Hawk (1932) by Anthony Gilmore,
the spray-on gloves from Abercrombie Station (1952) by Jack Vance,
the karatand from Stand on Zanzibar (1968) by John Brunner and the spray-on surgical glove from Altered Carbon (2003) by Richard Morgan.
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'...war-balloons, or, as it would be more correct to call them, navigable aerostats.'
'This robot is a creature... It is a manlike being. Therefore, like any other talking, thinking man, he is entitled to a court trial!'
'...small electric motors at the principal joints worked the prosthetic framework by means of steel cables...'
