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"I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'Science Fiction' and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Ro-Eye | ||
| A drone used for surveillance - a robot-eye. |
On Mars, a prison with robotic drone technology was difficult to escape from.
| On the lips of the nocturnal prowler there traced a tight, hard smile. So far, his elemental strategy had worked against the complex rationalized technologic system that made the Block revolt-proof and escape-proof.
The sirens were still silent. Once the sirens let go, an involved mechanical reflex, the Actualities Arc, housed in the Exec Wing, would be fed data by the so-called Periscope, an aggregate of scanner and robot-eye relay videos... His gaze focused on a swift scudding blob of shadow that suddenly detached itself from the gloom east of the Block, and flitted over lawns and walls toward the moat and the Exec Wing. It was the inner grounds Ro-Eye. The Ro-Eye itself was traveling as silently as its moon-cast shadow, some eighty feet over the Inter-ward Ramp. It was a microjetted cylinder with an infrared projector and a cluster of photocells in its nose. As it swept around and around the Block, it relayed the shifting view to the Periscope and its infrared eyes probed into the deepest gloom, missing nothing. Randall slid around the radrifle tower, intently watching that flitting shadow but careful to keep the opaque steel of the tower between him and the robot watchdog. When the Ro-Eye’s shadow was close to the moat, he jumped for it. |
| Technovelgy from The Unforeseen,
by Mark Champion. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1946 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the scarab robot flying insect from The Scarab (1936) by Raymond Z. Gallun, watchbird from Watchbird (1953) by Robert Sheckley, eyes from This Moment of the Storm (1966) by Roger Zelazny, the Ultraminiature Spy-Circuit from The Unknown (1972) by Christopher Anvil, copseyes from Cloak of Anarchy (1972) by Larry Niven, the sky ball from A Day For Damnation (1985) by David Gerrold, the drone floater camera from Runaway (1985) by Michael Crichton, the aerostat monitor from The Diamond Age (1995) by Neal Stephenson, the loiter drone from The Algebraist (2004) by Iain Banks and the bee cam from City of Pearl (2004) by Karen Traviss.
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