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"The wealth of the universe is all over your head. We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth..."
- Larry Niven
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| Peeper | ||
| A device that unlocked the dreams and fantasies inherent in the user's brain. |
The peeper is a small, handheld device with thirty-nine knobs; it is used as a "trigger mechanism to set loose the greatness and the beauty and the horror that lay within the user's brain."
| ...a peeper was nothing one should monkey with.
It was a simple thing to look at - like a lopsided pair of binoculars, with a lot of selector knobs on each side and on top of it. You looked into it and you twisted the knobs until you had what you wanted and there was a picture. You stepped into the picture and you lived the life you found there - the sort of life you picked by the setting of the knobs. And there were many lives to pick from, for there were millions of combinations that could be set up on the knobs and the factors ranged from the lightest kind of frippery to the most abysmal horror. The peeper was outlawed, naturally - it was worse than alcoholism, worse than dope, the most insidious vice that had ever hit mankind. It threw psychic hooks deep into the soul and tugged forevermore. When a man acquired the habit, and it was easy to acquire, there was no getting over it. He'd spend the rest of his life trying to sort his life out from all the fantasied ones, getting further and further from reality all the time, till nothing was real anymore. |
| From Shadow World,
by Clifford Simak. Published by Galaxy Science Fiction in 1957 Additional resources -
|
Simak returned to this idea repeatedly; see also the Dimensino from his 1961 novel Time is the Simplest Thing and the virtual shooting range from his 1963 novel Way Station.
Readers might also be reminded of the visi-sonor from the 1964 Asimov novel Foundation and Empire and the empathy box from the 1964 Philip K. Dick short story The Little Black Box.
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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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SF writers popularized and elaborated on this idea a generation before the first patents were filed.
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