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"I don't have an e-mail address. As much as I admire the Internet I suffer literally agoraphobia, which in it's original sense means a fear of the marketplace. I do not want to receive three hundred e-mail messages per week from strangers…"
- William Gibson
 |
| Filing Crystal | ||
| Part kiosk, part storage system. |
| Besides them, a twelve-foot filing crystal glowed like pin quartz. "Ron," said Rydra. "No, Ron and Calli, too."
The Navigators stepped up, puzzled. "You know some first navigator who suicided recently that you think we might—" Rydra shook her head. She passed her hand before the filing crystal. In the concaved screen at the base, words flashed. She stilled her fingers. "Navigator-Two. . . ." She turned her hand. "Navigator-One. . . ." She paused and ran her hand in a different direction.". . . male, male, male, female... Rydra watched, her hand drifting through centimeters over the crystal's face. The names on the screen flashed back and forth. Rydra's hand came down on the crystal face, and the name glowed on the screen. “Mollya Twa, Navigator-One." Her coordinate numbers followed. |
| From Babel-17,
by Samuel R. Delany. Published by Ace Books in 1966 Additional resources -
|
Regarding the use of gestures to manipulate an electronic device, compare to the hand wave control from Philip K. Dick's 1955 novel Solar Lottery and the gesture controlled devices in Douglas Adam's 1979 novel A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
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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.
