🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Feb.22.00.10.10.1990.28416@athos.rutgers.edu> josh@cs.rutgers.edu writes:
>Where's this last from?  Engines of Creation, page 90-91.
>
>So what?  So EoC was published in 1987.  Venus Belt was published 
>in 1981.

Yes, but John Varley's "Equinoctial" is copyright 1977.  Varley's "symbsuit"
predates both of your references by at least 4 years.

"Equinox was Parameter's companion, her environment, her space suit, her
 alter ego; her Symb.

"... none of [what she saw] was any more real than the image in a picture
 tube.  Some of it was even less real than that.  The shifting lines, for
 instance, were vector representations of the large chunks of rock and ice
 within radar range of Equinox.  ... all the sensory data she received was
 through the direct connection from Equinox's senses into her own brain.

 [Earlier in real time]  "The Symb was a soft-looking greenish lump in the
 center of the room [resembling] a pile of green cow manure. ...  She lifted
 her leg and touched one of her ped-fingers to the blob.  It stuck. ... It
 oozed up her leg, spreading itself thinner as it came.  In a short time it
 was inching up her neck. ...  When she opened her mouth the Symb flowed down
 her throat and trachea. ...  Meanwhile another tendril had filled the large
 and small intestine ...  Parameter felt a twinge of pain as a two-centimeter
 hole was eaten in the top of her head.  But it subsided as the Symb began to
 feel out the proper places to make connections."

Of course, the symbsuit is a product of "genetic engineering" built with the
aid of alien information intercepted from the Ophiuchi Hotline.  But I'm not
sure Varley distinguishes nanotech from biotech.  Anyway, there are far more
details than I care to type in, so I'll leave it to the interested reader to
explore Varley's writings for themself.

	Howard A. Landman
	landman@eng.sun.com -or- sun!landman

[The Symb certainly has a place in the history of the ideas leading
 up to the nanotech suit.  However, I think the derivation of the
 Symb was essentially to take the entire remainder of the ecology
 outside the human and collapse it into the smallest package possible.
 Obviously the green color was intended to suggest chlorophyll, even
 though that substance would be entirely useless in the story's
 location (the rings of Saturn, if I recall correctly).  Thus the
 Symb has a reductionist basis (whatever the ecology can do, the 
 Symb can do) as opposed the constructivist basis of the smartsuit
 (here's a gadget to do this, one to do this, etc).
 --JoSH]