Fiction
Silicon has been a theme of non-carbon-based-life since it also has 4 bonding sites and is just below carbon on the periodic table of the elements. This means silicon is very similar to carbon in its chemical characteristics. In cinematic and literary science fiction, when man-made machines cross from nonliving to living, this new form would be an example of non-carbon-based life. Since the advent of the microprocessor in the late 1960s, these machines are often classed as "silicon-based life". Another example of "silicon based life" is the episode "The Devil in the Dark" from Star Trek: The Original Series, where a living rock creature's biochemistry is based on silicon.
Read more about this topic: Carbon-based Life
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“We ignore thriller writers at our peril. Their genre is the political condition. They massage our dreams and magnify our nightmares. If it is true that we always need enemies, then we will always need writers of fiction to encode our fears and fantasies.”
—Daniel Easterman (b. 1949)
“Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)