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"The world is really so surreal these days that it's necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. The artist functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are."
- William Gibson
 |
| Portable Telephone | ||
| The essence of a cell phone. |
Matt Dodson is walking with a friend.
| "Say, your telephone is sounding."
"Oh!" Matt fumbled in his pouch and got out his phone. "Hello?" "That you, son?" came his father's voice. |
| Technovelgy from Space Cadet,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Scribner's Sons in 1948 Additional resources -
|
Another interesting feature of this passage is that it is the friend who hears the cell phone, not the owner of the phone. How many times have you had to point out to someone that their phone was going off?
Heinlein fans should also note the "pommel phone" in his excellent 1951 novel Between Planets:
Lazy twitched his shoulder muscles and snorted. Don reached for the pommel, removed the phone, and answered. "Mobile 6-J-233309, Don Harvey speaking."
See also the pocketphone from Heinlein's 1953 novel Assignment in Eternity. In this novel, he coins a better name.
As far as I know, the first reference to a pocket-sized telephone occurs in John Jones's Dollar by Harry Stephen Keeler, published in The Black Cat magazine in 1915; see the pocket wireless phone.
A few hundred yards further on Lazy [the horse] shied again, not from a snake this time but from an unexpected noise. Don pulled him in and spoke severely. "You bird-brained butterball! When are you going to learn not to jump when the telephone rings?"
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
