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"I can remember when the first pulsars were discovered. I was able to go and sit down and listen to graduate students talking about what their theories, to explain what pulsars really were."
- Vernor Vinge
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| Static House | ||
| A house that was once fully psychotropic and malleable, but which had been frozen in one configuration. |
Along the beaches of Vermillion Sands, most people prefered psychotropic houses that could change to fit the mood of the occupant. Some home owners, however, owing to their mental instability or extreme moods, had so affected their houses for the worse that the houses needed to be frozen in one state to be usable.
| Curiously, Stamers was in no hurry to switch on. He pointed to left and right as we made our way up the glass staircase to the terrace, underlining various attractive features, but made no effort to find the control console, and I suspected that the house might be a static conversion - a fair number of PT houses are frozen in one or other position at the end of their working lives, and make tolerable static homes. |
| Technovelgy from The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista,
by J.G. Ballard. Published by Amazing Fact and Science Fiction in 1962 Additional resources -
|
SF writers sometimes go a long distance to show you something new, like a psychotropic house, and how great they are, and then suddenly return you to your dull present with a term like "static home."
A similar kind of term would be groundcar, an ordinary automobile in a world of aircars.
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'a walking balloon proceeded with long strides of its aluminum legs...'
'There was nowhere on the planet where science and technology could not provide one with a comfortable home...'
'Most men updated their PIP on New Year's Day...'
'...a misshapen, many-tentacled thing about twice the size of a man.'
