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"The first thing that's wrong with being a science-fiction writer today is that the present has caught up with the future and surpassed it."
- Peter Watts
 |
| Sceneshifter | ||
| An automated display device that produced random pictorial presentations. |
| The place was cool and dark. A few men and women were at the bar; the rest sat around tables. Some youths were playing throw in the back. A mechanical tune-maker wheezed and composed in the corner, a shabby, half-ruined machine only partially functioning. Behind the bar a primitive sceneshifter created and destroyed vague phantasmagoria: seascapes, mountain peaks, snowy valleys, great rolling hills, a nude woman that lingered and then dissolved into one vast breast. Dim, uncertain processions that no one noticed or looked at.... |
| Technovelgy from Last of the Masters,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Orbit Science Fiction in 1954 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the moving picture player from When the Sleeper Wakes by HG Wells, and the life chamber from The Chamber of Life, by G. Peyton Wertenbaker.
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'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
