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"I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'Science Fiction' and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 |
| Photomnemonic Tablet | ||
| A device that both records and displays images with the same element. |
| I broke the seal on the dust jacket... The tablet was a featureless disk, like the blank used for grinding a telescope mirror, but darker - as if cast in obsidian. When I activated its remembrance function, its bottom-most layer turned the same color as the sun, for that was the origin of all the light now striking the tablet's surface. Because the tablet was out in the open with no lenses or mirrors to organize the light coming into it, it could not form an image of anything it saw... |
| Technovelgy from Anathem,
by Neal Stephenson. Published by Morrow in 2008 Additional resources -
|
The photomnemonic tablet also had controls that would let the user page through the images in a variety of ways.
This device reminds me in some ways of a slow glass scenedow from Bob Shaw's 1968 story.
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'Sapiro’s computer just kept dialing at random, hanging up on humans, until it got a fellow computer of the same type as itself.'
'I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks.'
'... all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'If you surf over a bump, the spokes contract to roll over it.'
'He wrote on it, using the pointed fingernail of his right forefinger...'
