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"At its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we can't predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe."
- John Brunner
 |
| Self-Lighting Cigarette | ||
| A cigarette with a matchhead built in. |
| When they reached her apartment she put tobacco and drink close to him, then went to her retiring room, threw off her street clothes and put on a soft loose robe that made her look even smaller and younger than she had looked before. When she rejoined Lazarus, he stood up, struck a cigarette for her, then paused as he handed it to her and gave a gallant and indelicate whistle. |
| Technovelgy from Methuselah's Children,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
|
This same item is also seen in Double Star, which Heinlein published in 1951:
It appears that elf-lighting cigarettes were marketed much earlier, around 1903, by a company in Warwickshire, called the Self-Lighting Cigarette Co.
Compare to the self-igniting cigarette from The Howling Bounders (1949) by Jack Vance and the coffee cube from The Marching Morons (1951) by C.M. Kornbluth.
I could have played him on boards, or read a speech in his place, within
twenty minutes. But this
part, as I understood it, would be more than such an interpretation; Dak
had hinted that I would have to
convince people who knew hlin well, perhaps in intimate circumstances. This
is surpassingly more
difficult. Does he take sugar in his coffee? If so, how much? Which hand
does he use to strike a cigarette
and with what gesture? I got the answer to that one and planted it deep in
my mind even as I phrased the
question; the simulacrum in front of me struck a cigarette in a fashion
that convinced me that he had
used matches and the oldfashioned sort of gasper for years before he had
gone along with the march of
so-called progress.
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'... an artificial intelligence equal to the human.'
'Rayno folded up the microterm and tucked it back inside his jumper.'
'Nemourlon armor of reasonable weight resists penetration by most fragments and any bullet that is not both reasonably heavy and fairly high-velocity.'
'Several thousand of them formed the positioning grid on the rubble pile.'
'Its slack walls tightened, bulged, were crossed by ripples and waves of movement.'
'Norman... had never ridden any motorized device that lacked onboard steering and balance systems.'
You will note that HG Wells also figured out the aspect ratio of the future!
'As though a switch had been turned off, the pain stopped...'
'At the ringside opposite them a table had been removed to make room for a large transparent plastic capsule on wheels.'
