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"Science fiction represents the modern heresy and the cutting edge of speculative imagination as it grapples with Mysterious Time---linear or non-linear time."
- Frank Herbert
 |
| Rhetorizer | ||
| A computerized assistant for writers. |
Ever needed help with your writing? A pity that you don't have a rhetorizer to help you write on any subject.
| ...he seated himself at the rhetorizer, touched its on-tab...
At the keyboard of the rhetorizer he typed, carefully, the substantive he wanted. Squirrel. Then, after a good two minutes of sluggish, deep thought, the limiting adjective smart. "OK," he said, and sat back, and touched the rerun tab. The rhetorizer, as Colleen reentered the room with her tall drink, began to construct for him in the aud-dimension. "It is a wise old squirrel," it said tinnily (it possessed only a two-inch speaker), "and yet its wisdom is not its own; nature has endowed it-" "Aw, God," Joe Adams said savagely and slapped off the sleek, steel and plastic machine with all its many microcomponents; it became silent. "Dear," Colleen said and sighed. "I only heard you give it two semantic units; give it more to ogpon." "I'll give it plenty to ogpon." He touched the on-tab and typed an entire sentence. 'The well-informed dead rat romped under the pink log.' "When's the speech due?" "Tomorrow night." The rhetorizer, in its cricket's voice, intoned folksily... |
| Technovelgy from The Penultimate Truth,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Belmont Productions in 1964 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the knowledge engine from Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, the novel-writing machine from 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) (1948) by George Orwell, the electronic bard from The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age (1965) and the verse transcriber from Studio 5, The Stars (1971) by J.G. Ballard.
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
