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"If I had to get a new Ph.D. now, I'd get it in polymer engineering - the manipulation of matter."
- Bart Kosko
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| Womb Room | ||
| The ultimate ship's bridge. |
What does the bridge, the room in a space ship where the captain, navigator and other officers command the ship, look like in the far future? You've seen many efforts to answer this question; everyone remembers the original Star Trek bridge. Larry Niven has his own answer; it looks like whatever you want.
| The control room was a hollow sphere with a remarkable chair in the exact center, surrounded by a horseshoe-shaped bank of controls, and approached via a catwalk of metal lace. The chair would assume a fantastic variety of positions, and it gave indecently good massages. The spherical wall could disappear to display the black sky as if Corbell and the control bank floated alone in space. It would display textbooks on astronomy or astrophysics or State history, or updated diagrams of the ship. Corbell called it the Womb Room. |
| Technovelgy from A World Out of Time,
by Larry Niven. Published by Random House in 1976 Additional resources -
|
The only problem with scrolling astronomical texts across your view screen is that you might inadvertently obscure something important. Imagine your embarassment if you were trying to read up on "meteors" - only to run into one!
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'... he had tightened the chest to gain maximum pumping action from the motion of breathing.'
'...a prayer wheel swung into view and began spinning at a furious pace.'
'And are all the people willing to be governed by a machine?'
'It's an old model,' Rawlins said. 'I'm not sure what to do.'
'the robot-boss was busy at the lip of the new lode instructing and egging the men on to greater speed...'
'He rode the bike with an intense lack of physical grace...'
