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"I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development."
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| Human Quarter | ||
| A ghetto for human beings; in this case, in a world of robots. |
Robots run everything; some lucky humans have jobs doing things to help robots. Some of them even have holidays off.
| Goods from the wealthy colonies of Venus and Mars and Ganymede filled the open-air marts. Robots drifted in swarms, sampling and pricing and discussing and gossiping. A few humans were visible, mostly household servants in charge of maintenance, stocking up on supplies. Crow edged his way through and beyond the marts. He was approaching the human quarter of the city. He could smell it already. The faint pungent scent of humans.
The robots, of course, were odorless. In a world of odorless machines the human scent stood out in bold relief. The human quarter was a section of the city once prosperous. Humans had moved in and property values had dropped. Gradually the houses had been abandoned by robots and now humans exclusively lived there. Crow, in spite of his position, was obliged to live in the human quarter. His house, a uniform five-room dwelling, identical with the others, was located to the rear of the quarter. One house of many. |
| Technovelgy from James P. Crow,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Planet Stories in 1954 Additional resources -
|
I seem to recall that in This Immortal, a Roger Zelazny novel, the humans had been allowed to move to the center of civilization (as I recall, Taler, which orbited Vega), but alien property values also dropped.
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'...the rocket’s landing-arms automatically unfolded.'
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'The low-slung monorail car, straddling its single track, bored through the shadows on a slowly rising course.'
'It was a smooth ovoid floating a few inches from the floor...'
'... he thrust in his charging arm to replenish his store of energy.'
'...the terrible Jovian gravity that made each movement an effort.'
