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"The trouble with too much genre SF is that it's so obviously the product of the conscious mind."
- William Gibson
 |
| Toll Door | ||
| An apartment door that operates on a cash-only basis. |
This idea flows throughout the novel; particular items require an immediate, cash payment.
Joe Chip is sitting in his apartment; he walks to his front door to open it.
| The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you." "I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt." ...he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. "You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug. |
| From Ubik,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1969 Additional resources -
|
In the past, I've seen bathroom stall doors that only opened for a fee; often when you pull to the curb with your car, you walk over to a device that accepts coins.
Here's another quote:
Compare this device with the cheerfully serviceful self-satisfied door from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
"Five cents, please," his front door said when he tried to open it. One thing, anyhow, hadn't changed. The toll door had an innate stubbornness to it; probably it would hold out after everything else.
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'A worker replaced by a nubot... had to be compensated.'
'... forcing the energy transfer which allowed him to regrow his lost fingers.'
'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
