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"Real science opens windows for us to look through. We're right at the footsteps of the most interesting scientists around."
- Larry Niven
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| Robot Vending Machine | ||
| Machinery displaces news boys selling papers on street corners. |
| Mr.
WILLIAM WINDSOR, a hard- MR.headed, grim-visaged newspaperman of forty, stood nonchalantly on the moving walk that swept him briskly down Fifth Avenue. He smiled with pardonable pride as he listened to the raucous magnetic speakers shouting out the phrases that drew excited mobs to the robot vending machines which sold the yet damp news strips of printed shorthand...
Bill stepped off the moving sidewalk by the corner vending machine, dropped a coin in the slot, and received a copy of the damp shorthand strip delivered fresh from the presses by magnetic tube. He read his story, standing in a busy street that rustled quietly with the whir of moving walks and the barely audible drone of the thousands of electrically driven heliocars which spun smoothly along on rubber-tired wheels, or easily lifted themselves to skimming flight upon whirling helicopters. |
| Technovelgy from The Prince of Space,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Amazing Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the homotropic news vending machine from The Game Players of Titan (1963) by Philip K. Dick.
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Tech news articles related to works by Jack Williamson
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'Hocus-pocus religions and archaic weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.'
'Oscar picked up a trowel. 'I'm the tool for the mortar,' the little trowel squeaked cheerfully.'
'... he waited for the robotrix attendant to finish fueling up his ship.'
The Roujin Z system provides care to fully bedridden patients - and then some!
'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
