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"[Science fiction] is the only kind of writing that allows you to look at the world we live in and change one piece at a time."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Photomnemonic Tablet | ||
| A device that both records and displays images with the same element. |
| I broke the seal on the dust jacket... The tablet was a featureless disk, like the blank used for grinding a telescope mirror, but darker - as if cast in obsidian. When I activated its remembrance function, its bottom-most layer turned the same color as the sun, for that was the origin of all the light now striking the tablet's surface. Because the tablet was out in the open with no lenses or mirrors to organize the light coming into it, it could not form an image of anything it saw... |
| Technovelgy from Anathem,
by Neal Stephenson. Published by Morrow in 2008 Additional resources -
|
The photomnemonic tablet also had controls that would let the user page through the images in a variety of ways.
This device reminds me in some ways of a slow glass scenedow from Bob Shaw's 1968 story.
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'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
'Midges have many capabilities. To the untrained eye, they look like sparrows.'
'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
'It sounds to me as though you had invented a kind of metal earthworm.'
