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"[Science fiction] is the only kind of writing that allows you to look at the world we live in and change one piece at a time."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Static House | ||
| A house that was once fully psychotropic and malleable, but which had been frozen in one configuration. |
Along the beaches of Vermillion Sands, most people prefered psychotropic houses that could change to fit the mood of the occupant. Some home owners, however, owing to their mental instability or extreme moods, had so affected their houses for the worse that the houses needed to be frozen in one state to be usable.
| Curiously, Stamers was in no hurry to switch on. He pointed to left and right as we made our way up the glass staircase to the terrace, underlining various attractive features, but made no effort to find the control console, and I suspected that the house might be a static conversion - a fair number of PT houses are frozen in one or other position at the end of their working lives, and make tolerable static homes. |
| Technovelgy from The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista,
by J.G. Ballard. Published by Amazing Fact and Science Fiction in 1962 Additional resources -
|
SF writers sometimes go a long distance to show you something new, like a psychotropic house, and how great they are, and then suddenly return you to your dull present with a term like "static home."
A similar kind of term would be groundcar, an ordinary automobile in a world of aircars.
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Tech news articles related to works by J.G. Ballard
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Science Fiction
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'The greatest problem of all was the elimination of the human element of braking together with its inevitable time lag.'
'Across the ancient sea floor a dozen tall, blue-sailed Martian sand ships floated, like blue smoke.'
'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
