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"None of us, no matter what continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 |
| Banning Gun | ||
| Shoots a pencil heat ray. |
| A Banning gun spat its sizzling heat-ray, drilled Green and ended with a violet-red shower of sparks up on the metal dome-casing.
 (Banning gun heat ray) I saw the running figure heading sternward — and I didn’t miss. My heat-stab went through him, so clean and swift a drilled little hole that, though he was dead, his body of its own momentum seemed to keep on running with buckling legs. |
| Technovelgy from Voyage 13,
by Ray Cummings. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1938 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the heat ray from War of the Worlds (1898) by HG Wells, the death-ray from The World Masters (1903) by George Griffiths, the short-wave surgical knife from Boomerang (1953) by Eric Frank Russell, the ray gun from The Black Star Passes (1930) by John W. Campbell, the pencil heat ray from Brigands of the Moon (1930) by Ray Cummings and the flesh gun from The Computer Connection (1974) by Alfred Bester.
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and Technology by Ray Cummings
Tech news articles related to Voyage 13
Tech news articles related to works by Ray Cummings
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'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors that circulate around the satellite, making it habitable.'
'The steel tortoise gave MacKinnon a feeling of Crusoe- like independence.'
'...then back to their work, though little enough it was on these automatic cultivators.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
'I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh.'
