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"I started writing in the 1930's when I was eighteen years old. And deep inside me I'm still eighteen and it's still 1938."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Coffin Rack | ||
| A hotel with very (very!) small rooms. |
Looking for an inexpensive place to stay? In the city in Japan? You might want to try a coffin hotel. Lots cheaper than a regular room - maybe because a coffin hotel is a room stripped down to the bare essentials - the parts you use the most.
| The New Rose Hotel is a coffin rack on the ragged fringes of Narita International. Plastic capsules a meter high and three long, stacked like surplus Godzilla teeth in a concrete lot off the main road to the airport. Each capsule has a television mounted flush with the ceiling. I spend whole days watching Japanese game shows and old movies. |
| From The Science Fiction Yearbook (ed. Jerry Pournelle),
by William Gibson. Published by Omni Publications in 1984 Additional resources -
|
Perfect for Gibson's future urban sprawl dramas. The name of the short story is New Rose Hotel. It was made into a movie in 1988.
And, just to clear things up, Gibson did not invent the idea of a coffin hotel. They are real hotels that date from at least the early 1970's. I also remember the original hotel in Walt Disney World in Orlando; each room was a fully constructed "shoebox" that was hoisted into place.
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Science Fiction Yearbook (ed. Jerry Pournelle)
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and Technology by William Gibson
Tech news articles related to The Science Fiction Yearbook (ed. Jerry Pournelle)
Tech news articles related to works by William Gibson
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| Seasteading Floating Cities |
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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'Of course, being negative matter, when you push it, it comes toward you..'
'They'll also start pulling in gases and liquids from the local atmosphere...'
'The plastex swam and whirled like boiling toothpaste...'
'The object is built up of an infinite series of plane layers, at the focus of the ray...'
'... the computing mechanisms that studied and restructured the incoming material.'
'... an instrument having relatively small bit pieces adapted to be gripped between the teeth.'
'A procession of automatic ore carts was racing over the bleak slag'
'The cab was an egg-shaped bubble of light metals and plastics...'
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