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"Does it open a new horizon for my thinking? Does it lead me to think new kinds of thoughts, that I would not otherwise perhaps have thought at all? These qualities are what [make] science fiction ...unique."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Automated Apartment Maintenance | ||
| Automated devices that would oversee the maintenance of a rented apartment. |
| Picking up the vidphone, he dialed 214, the extension for the maintenance circuit of the building. "Listen," he said, when the homeostatic entity answered. "I'm now in a position to divert some of my funds in the direction of settling my bill vis-a-vis your clean-up robots. I'd like them up here right now to go over my apt. I'll pay the full and entire bill when they're finished."
"Sir, you'll pay your full and entire bill before they start." |
| Technovelgy from Ubik,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1969 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the repair robots from The Well-Oiled Machine (1950) by H.B. Fyfe, the Powered Suit with Trauma Maintenance from The Forever War (1974) by Joe Haldeman, the service drones from The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979) by James P. Hogan, the Christmas Bush Motile Robot from Rocheworld (1985) by Robert Forward, the maritime robots from Mare Nostrum (2022) by Bruce Sterling and the maintenance drone (holon) from The Mountain in the Sea (2022) by Ray Naylor.
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'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...'
'The greatest problem of all was the elimination of the human element of braking together with its inevitable time lag.'
'Across the ancient sea floor a dozen tall, blue-sailed Martian sand ships floated, like blue smoke.'
'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
