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"SF looks towards an imaginary future, while fantasy, by and large, looks towards an imaginary past."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Automatic Delivery Library | ||
| A library able to deliver any volume within a few moments. |
Everyone with piles of books around the house would really like to have one of these.
| "Knock you cold? Kidnap you? Circus costume?" repeated the dictator, with a puzzled expression. "I do not know those words. They have a very queer antique sound. If you will excuse me, I shall investigate." While his visitors looked on with wide, gaping eyes he pressed a lettered button that stood with hundreds of others on a dial at one end of the room. A few seconds passed in silence; then a panel on the wall rattled open, and a huge volume slid in through a pneumatic tube and arranged itself neatly on a table. "This dictionary isn't exactly up-to-the-minute," remarked Spratt, as he thumbed through the thousands of pages. "It dates back to the late twenty-four twenties. ... Ah, here we are. 'Kidnap. Obsolete. To steal bodily. Refers to a barbarous practice of the Ages of Confusion, no case of which has been known for over three hundred years." |
| Technovelgy from The Lord of Tranerica,
by Stanton A. Coblentz. Published by Dynamic Science Stories in 1939 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the universal dictionary from The Star Beast (1954) by Robert Heinlein and the robot librarian filer from The Robot Who Wanted to Know (1962) by Harry Harrison.
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Lord of Tranerica
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and Technology by Stanton A. Coblentz
Tech news articles related to The Lord of Tranerica
Tech news articles related to works by Stanton A. Coblentz
Automatic Delivery Library-related
news articles:
- The Library Of The Future
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| Heat Waver - The First Ever Combo Solar Collector And Wind Turbine |
| Tesla 'Fleet Response Agents' Bolster FSD Autonomy |
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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.'
