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"On-line gaming environments are completely different things... Essentially it's massive global role-playing."
- Peter Watts
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| Talking Head | ||
| A mechanical head (with an analog voice) used as the output terminal for a computer. |
One of the elements I most admire in Gibson's work is the use of archaic devices to provide a background for the high technology elements. A favorite is this talking head, which spurns inexpensive digital voice reproduction in favor of an elaborate mechanism which creates a woodwind-like sound.
| …a head, an intricately worked bust, cloisonné over platinum, studded with seed pearls and lapis. ..The thing was a computer terminal…it could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but with a beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes. It was a baroque thing for anyone to have constructed, a perverse thing, because synth-voice chips cost next to nothing…Smith jacked the head into his computer and listened as the melodious, inhuman voice piped the figures of last year's tax return. |
| Technovelgy from Neuromancer,
by William Gibson. Published by Phantasia Press in 1984 Additional resources -
|
There are lots of other examples; I particularly liked his description of the living quarters of the owner of an entire orbital village, which contained "old" pieces of technology that are current in the 1980's, when the novel was written.
Compare to the artificially produced speech from Hotel Cosmos (1938) by Raymond Z. Gallun.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Neuromancer
More Ideas
and Technology by William Gibson
Tech news articles related to Neuromancer
Tech news articles related to works by William Gibson
Talking Head-related
news articles:
- WT-6 Waseda Talking Robot Head From Neuromancer
- WAHHA GO GO Laughing Head
- Musical Robotic Head
- Korean Talking Robotic Head
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'Our planes are going to start bringing in bales of discarded plastics...'
'... completely forgetting the ship at sight of the awesome figure and great head of the giant Gaut...'
'So, Ender, we will now begin your education.'
'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
