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"Everything starts as somebody's daydream. And, when you're daydreaming, it is science fiction. It's when you start work out how you put it together, true science fiction becomes real science."
- Larry Niven
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| Watercouch | ||
| A couch filled with water, rather than springs and cushions. |
This is a very simple extension of a now common idea; make use of waterbed technology in other rooms in your house.
| And there are times when I am so full of learning and being and doing that the moments zip past and the days are packed, and other times when I am floating in slack water beside a current, and the world is sliding speedily by. There was plenty to do. I didn't feel like doing it. Albert was bursting with news from Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory. I let him purge himself. But the synoptics plopped into my mind without raising a question or even a ripple; when he was through reporting about architectural deductions and interpretations of maunderings of the Dead Men I turned him off. It was intensely interesting, but for some reason I was not interested by it. I ordered Harriet to let my simulacrum deal with everything routine and tell everyone who was not urgent to call me another time. I stretched out on the three-meter watercouch looking out over the weird Brasilia skyline, and wished that it were that couch in the Food Factory, connected to someone I loved. |
| Technovelgy from Beyond the Blue Event Horizon,
by Frederik Pohl. Published by Ballantine in 1980 Additional resources -
|
Lots of people think that science fiction writer Robert Heinlein invented the waterbed; see the entry for hydraulic bed, from Stranger in a Strange Land for a more complete story.
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Science Fiction
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'...they moved with the ease of dandelion puffs.'
'...some bored drone pusher in a remote driving centre...'
'These pods were programmed to hang in space in a hexagonal grid pattern...'
'...the meteor caught and halted just as a small boy catches a swift ball in his cap.'
'We have decided that it shall be but one ship... it must contain everything needed to take us through the generations.'
'You’re the robopsychologist of the plant, so you’re to study the robot itself...'
