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"I don't have an e-mail address. As much as I admire the Internet I suffer literally agoraphobia, which in it's original sense means a fear of the marketplace. I do not want to receive three hundred e-mail messages per week from strangers…"
- William Gibson
 |
| Mechavalet | ||
| An entirely automated dressing assistant. |
| A closet door slid into a wall. A slender machine, five feet tall and with sixteen long metal tentacles rolled across the room on soft rubber wheels.
It looked like a mechanical monster from another world, but it was merely a very efficient machine to undress the house's masters—a mechavalet. The mechavalet paused behind the woman's back. Sixteen rubber-tipped metal tentacles reached out. The machine normally undressed a person with smoothness and gentleness. This time the house made it operate as roughly as possible.
 (Mechavalet from 'The Angry House' by Richard R. Smith) The sixteen tentacles moved swiftly and the machine tore the woman's dress to shreds before she could even scream. |
| Technovelgy from The Angry House,
by Richard R. Smith. Published by Startling Stories in 1955 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the electrical valet from The Lord of Tranerica (1939) by Stanton A. Coblentz and the dressing machine from Roll Out the Rollov! by Christopher Anvil.
See also the automatic valet from Looking Forward: A Dream of the United States of the Americas in 1999 (1899) by Arthur Bird, the butler-valet robot from The Jester (1951) by William Tenn, the robant from The Impossible Planet (1953) by Philip K. Dick, the consumption robots from The Midas Plague (1954) by Frederik Pohl, the robutler from The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge (1970) by Harry Harrison and the autobutle from The Godmakers (1972) by Frank Herbert.
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'A human brain snugly encased in a transparent skull-shaped receptacle.'
'The actuating mechanism that should have operated by the imprint of her image on the telephoto cell...'
'The only real cost was in the plastic balloon that guided the growth of the coral and enclosed the coral's special air-borne food.'
'The border was defended by... a swarm of quasi-independent aerostats.'
'The pitiless M rays pierced Earth and steel and densest concrete as if they were so much transparent glass...'
'Pina2bo would have to operate full blast for many years to put as much SO2 into the stratosphere as its namesake had done in a few minutes.'
'Nanny is different,' Tom Fields murmured... 'she's not like a machine. She's like a person.'
'We made a crude , small cell and were delighted - and, I admit, somewhat surprised - to find it worked.'
'...we've promised him a generous pension from the royalties.'
'The clothes and jewelery drew their tiny power requirements from her movements.'
