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" I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences. And if I feel like going on, or if something turns me on I'll just keep writing till I'm written out."
- Roger Zelazny
 |
| Rhetorizer | ||
| A computerized assistant for writers. |
Ever needed help with your writing? A pity that you don't have a rhetorizer to help you write on any subject.
| ...he seated himself at the rhetorizer, touched its on-tab...
At the keyboard of the rhetorizer he typed, carefully, the substantive he wanted. Squirrel. Then, after a good two minutes of sluggish, deep thought, the limiting adjective smart. "OK," he said, and sat back, and touched the rerun tab. The rhetorizer, as Colleen reentered the room with her tall drink, began to construct for him in the aud-dimension. "It is a wise old squirrel," it said tinnily (it possessed only a two-inch speaker), "and yet its wisdom is not its own; nature has endowed it-" "Aw, God," Joe Adams said savagely and slapped off the sleek, steel and plastic machine with all its many microcomponents; it became silent. "Dear," Colleen said and sighed. "I only heard you give it two semantic units; give it more to ogpon." "I'll give it plenty to ogpon." He touched the on-tab and typed an entire sentence. 'The well-informed dead rat romped under the pink log.' "When's the speech due?" "Tomorrow night." The rhetorizer, in its cricket's voice, intoned folksily... |
| Technovelgy from The Penultimate Truth,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Belmont Productions in 1964 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the knowledge engine from Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, the novel-writing machine from 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) (1948) by George Orwell, the electronic bard from The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age (1965) and the verse transcriber from Studio 5, The Stars (1971) by J.G. Ballard.
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'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
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'... completely forgetting the ship at sight of the awesome figure and great head of the giant Gaut...'
'So, Ender, we will now begin your education.'
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'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
