Latest By
Category:
Armor
Artificial
Intelligence
Biology
Clothing
Communication
Computers
Culture
Data Storage
Displays
Engineering
Entertainment
Food
Input Devices
Lifestyle
Living Space
Manufacturing
Material
Media
Medical
Miscellaneous
Robotics
Security
Space Tech
Spacecraft
Surveillance
Transportation
Travel
Vehicle
Virtual
Person
Warfare
Weapon
Work
"It's hard to tell stories about critters that are not human. John W. Campbell tried it, in "Twilight," and everybody says it's a wonderful story, and nobody ever reads it twice."
- Jerry Pournelle
 |
| Remote-Control Slavery | ||
| Mental control (possibly mediated by radio waves) of individuals of other species. |
| “We’re only beginning to understand this, and of course I don’t have much of the inside information myself, but as I piece it together it seems that these beings make use of lower life-forms, turning them essentially into radio-controlled robots. They’ll use anything with limbs and mobility. They started with certain animals of their own planet, a small dolphin-like form perhaps on the threshold of intelligence, and worked through them to achieve a space drive. Then they got to neighboring planets—land planets— and took control of pseudoprimates, protochimps of some kind. They look for fingers. Manual dexterity counts a great deal with them. At present their sphere of influence covers some eighty light-years and appears to be spreading at an exponential rate.”
Muller shook his head. “This is worse nonsense than the stuff you were handing me about a cure. Look, there’s a limiting velocity for radio transmission, right? If they’re controlling flunkeys from eighty light-years away, it’ll take eighty years for any command to reach its destination. Every twitch of a muscle, every trifling movement—” “They can leave their home world,” said Rawlins. “But if they’re so big—” “They’ve used their slave beings to build gravity tanks. They also have a star drive. All their colonies are run by overseers in orbit a few thousand kilometers up, floating in a simulated home-world environment. It takes one overseer to run one planet. I suppose they rotate tours of duty.” |
| From The Man in the Maze,
by Robert Silverberg. Published by Avon Books in 1969 Additional resources -
|
Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This |
Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Man in the Maze
More Ideas
and Technology by Robert Silverberg
Tech news articles related to The Man in the Maze
Tech news articles related to works by Robert Silverberg
Remote-Control Slavery-related
news articles:
- Humans Use Mental Power For Turtle Slavery
| Phil Nuyttnn's City Under The Sea |
| Stick-On Tape Speakers, As Predicted By Bruce Sterling |
| Has Climate Change Already Been Solved By Aliens? |
| Skin Electronics 3D Printed |
Want to Contribute an
Item?
It's easy:
Get the name of the item, a
quote, the book's name and the author's name, and Add
it here.
| <Previous | Next> |
|
|
|
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
|
'Of course not a vehicle moved by means of internal explosions of a derivative of rock oil...'
'When he had first built them, they had been crude indeed, flying mechanisms with little more than a reflex-response unit.'
'If you couldn't see the ads, how would you know what was fashionable?'
'Its lines wavered, flowed, and then painfully reformed.'
'Had these machines in some incredible fashion been provided with brains?'
'I used my implant to tell MILLIE what we wanted and she took care of it'
'Under the lower roof there was no water, but a clear and luminous atmosphere...'
