[hinkley]

Some of Vernor Vinge's books deal with the 'alien' in alien intelligence in ways that were quite illuminating/shocking for me at the time. They weren't just humanoids with animal instincts. He created intelligent spiders that were believable. And the only sympathetic treatment of a hive mind I've yet encountered (Card's are pale in comparison)

But one of my favorite inventions of his was a creature that had somehow evolved wheels. With veins and nerves and such there is hardly a creature on earth that can rotate a limb farther much farther than 200°, and the ones that can, like owls, we treat with a certain reverence.

Developing an artificial wrist that can spin arbitrarily would be, I'd think, a quite compelling compensation for someone having to use a prosthetic arm. It would also make for some wicked Rubix solving skills. I wonder how proprioception would deal with that though...

[chewxy]

On that note, I also highly recommend Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time.