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"Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen."
- Larry Niven
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| Minimic Film | ||
| Very fine message medium. |
For an era in which microfilm was the defining standard of very tiny media for use by spies, shigawire of one-micron diameter is even better for espionage.
| Hawat shrugged. "It's a scrap of a note. We took it from a Harkonnen courier. The note was intended for an agent named Pardee. We've good reason to believe Pardee was top man in the Harkonnen underground here. The note--it's a thing that could have great consequence or no consequence. It's susceptible to various interpretations." "What's the delicate content of this note?" "Scrap of a note, my Lord. Incomplete. It was on minimic film with the usual destruction capsule attached. We stopped the acid action just short of full erasure, leaving only a fragment. The fragment, however, is extremely suggestive." |
| Technovelgy from Dune,
by Frank Herbert. Published by Putnam in 1965 Additional resources -
|
Note also the clever use of the root word for "minimum" - the author is able to invent a new word that yet seems familiar and well-defined. The word "minim" is also used in the novel to denote the smallest usable amount of something.
See also the definition of shigawire, from the same book.
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'The crawling... object was V-Stephen's surgeon-hand...'
'Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses...'
'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
