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"In science fiction one can say a great many things that are unpalatable, … because it's expressed as science fiction you can slip it past their defenses."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Machine Apartment | ||
| Each person lives isolated in their own room, supported by a vast planetary machine. |
Fascinating picture presented of life in isolation.
| Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk--that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh--a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs... |
| Technovelgy from The Machine Stops,
by E.M. Forster. Published by Oxford and Cambridge Review in 1909 Additional resources -
|
Everything you need - information, food, even medical care - is provided to you. No one needs to leave their room.
The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well.
See the reference for the telemedicine apparatus from the same story. See also micro-bachelor apartment from Idoru by William Gibson, automated apartment maintenance from Ubik by Philip K. Dick and Quadraturin from Quadraturin, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanowsky.
Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.
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Tech news articles related to The Machine Stops
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| AI-THu Shapeshifting Transformer Home |
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'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down...'
'Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence...'
'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
