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"What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 |
| Coffin Rack Capsule Hotel | ||
| 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. |
| Technovelgy 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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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Science Fiction Yearbook (ed. Jerry Pournelle)
More Ideas
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
Coffin Rack Capsule Hotel-related
news articles:
- Tokyo's Nakagin Capsule Tower Tear-Down, Neuromancer's Coffin Hotel Lives Forever
| AI-THu Shapeshifting Transformer Home |
| With Mycotecture, We'll Just Grow The Space Habitats We Need |
| Vast Apartment Living Will Get Even More Vast |
| LiquidView Ersatz Windows, ala Philip K. Dick |
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
