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"Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful."
- Philip K. Dick
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| Womb Room | ||
| The ultimate ship's bridge. |
What does the bridge, the room in a space ship where the captain, navigator and other officers command the ship, look like in the far future? You've seen many efforts to answer this question; everyone remembers the original Star Trek bridge. Larry Niven has his own answer; it looks like whatever you want.
| The control room was a hollow sphere with a remarkable chair in the exact center, surrounded by a horseshoe-shaped bank of controls, and approached via a catwalk of metal lace. The chair would assume a fantastic variety of positions, and it gave indecently good massages. The spherical wall could disappear to display the black sky as if Corbell and the control bank floated alone in space. It would display textbooks on astronomy or astrophysics or State history, or updated diagrams of the ship. Corbell called it the Womb Room. |
| Technovelgy from A World Out of Time,
by Larry Niven. Published by Random House in 1976 Additional resources -
|
The only problem with scrolling astronomical texts across your view screen is that you might inadvertently obscure something important. Imagine your embarassment if you were trying to read up on "meteors" - only to run into one!
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'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.'
'At the end of each appendage's eight fingers there are tinier appendages...'
'We want to do something to help those who are suffering from tooth loss or absence,' said lead researcher Katsu Takahashi.
