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"If I had to get a new Ph.D. now, I'd get it in polymer engineering - the manipulation of matter."
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Barney Mayerson had a problem. He was about to be drafted, which in this future Earth means
that he was about to be selected to be resettled on another world. How to avoid this miserable
fate? Figure out some way to be declared "4F"; he was determined to develop enough neuroses to
be undraftable. All he needed was a good coach...
It fits the Dickian world perfectly; a psychiatrist is used to increase the number of neuroses.
It should also be noted that this device is artificially intelligent and appears to be a distributed application, not merely a locally resident application:
Obligingly, the girl turned the psychiatrist on...
"I know a Mr. Bayerson," Dr. Smile said. "In fact I'm with him right now, via portable extension, of course, right in his office."
Later on, one of the characters has this to say about Dr. Smile:
Compare this device with
the robot psyche tester from Colony (1953) by Philip K. Dick, the unit analyst robot from The Chromium Fence (1955) by Philip K. Dick,
Sigrid von Shrink from Gateway (1970) by Frederik Pohl,
the machine psychologist from James Blish's Cities in Flight,
the mechanotherapist from Bad Medicine (a 1956 Robert Sheckley story). Comment/Join this discussion ( 2 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
resources: Dr. Smile-related
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