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"...the elements of cyberpunk have dissolved into the whole SF genre, so it’s hard to find anyone writing who doesn’t owe serious debts to Gibson and his crew."
- Richard Morgan
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| Electronic Voting | ||
| A system of elections that used the responses of a statistically average voter. |
This if the first use of this phrase in science fiction, and it's not quite what you think.
Norman Muller, ordinary clerk of a small department store in Bloomington, Indiana, would exercise the franchise based on his responses to a computer's questions.
“Multivac already has most of the information it needs to decide all the elections, national, state and local. It needs only to check certain imponderable attitudes of mind and it will use you for that. We can’t predict what questions it will ask, but they may not make much sense to you, or even to us. It may ask you how you feel about garbage-disposal in your town; whether you favor central incinerators. It might ask you whether you have a doctor of your own or whether you make use of National Medicine, Inc.
| In this imperfect world, the sovereign citizens of the first and greatest Electronic Democracy had, through Norman Muller (through him! ) exercised once again its free, untrammeled franchise. |
| Technovelgy from Franchise,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by If: Worlds of Science Fiction in 1955 Additional resources -
|
Compare to electronic government from Shockwave Rider (1975) by John Brunner.
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'There was a wall ahead... It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'
'...support the interior human structure against Jupiter’s pull.'
'Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray...'
'The German chemists have discovered how to supply the needed elements in compact, undiluted form...'
'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
