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"I've been very obsessive about writing science fiction for far too many years. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have given up years ago."
- Charles Stross
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| Filmbook | ||
| A storage medium for information, both text and video. |
Filmbooks not only show you interesting facts, but they help you to remember them.
| FILMBOOK: any shigawire imprint used in training and carrying a mnemonic pulse. |
| Technovelgy from Dune,
by Frank Herbert. Published by Putnam in 1965 Additional resources -
|
The filmbook technology builds on several different Dune ideas. Shigawire is a multipurpose science fictional device; it is a recording medium, based on the idea of wire recording, which preceded recording tape (in the real world).
The mnemonic pulse is a based on the real-world idea of a mnemonic device, a trick to help people remember. For example, I can easily remember the Harvard Spectral Classification Scheme, which goes in order of decreasing temperature. The types are OBAFGKMRNS; you can remember it with the mnemonic device Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me Right Now Sweetie. (One guesses that astrophysicists of that era were mostly male...)
A wealthy collector's study looks like this:
Compare to filmag from Sunward Flight (1943) by Leo Zagat.
The globe sat on a freeform stand at one wall of a windowless room whose other walls presents a patchwork of multicolored scrolls, filmbooks, tapes and reels. Light glowed in the room from golden balls hanging in mobile suspensor fields.
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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.'
