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"When you're making a revolution in cyberspace, things look rather different from the way the 1980s cyberpunks wrote it."
- Charles Stross
 |
| Protolectric Gun | ||
| Fires twin beams of protons and electrons. |
You know you're in good hands with Campbell:
They just don't write them like that anymore.
Two streams of nearly invisible fire reached out in lines as straight as a linear equation toward the two Patrol cruisers.
| "...their ships have a weapon we have not been able to duplicate — the protolectric gun,” replied the officer, turning smartly and walking away. Markham chuckled. The Lane Patrolman had retired in poor order.
The E. R. C. [Eugenics Research Colony] was a sore spot on the Lane Patrol’s otherwise spotless record. Thanks to a mechanism capable of projecting twin beams of highly dangerous electrons and protons from a “gun”, their ships had beaten off patrol cruisers time and again. |
| Technovelgy from Electronic Siege,
by John W. Campbell. Published by Wonder Stories in 1932 Additional resources -
|
Here's the effect that they have:
Two enormous brilliant pipes of blue-green fire leaped out and spattered against the ship. Instantly it was wreathed with an aura of shooting flame from the waste energy of the beams. The four-foot armour of the ship was glowing white-hot in a fraction of a second. In a second it was bellying out in gusts of flaming gas; in five seconds a great hole was gaping in the ship’s wall...
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
