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"We didn't have a telephone and our family until I was about 15, in high school."
- Ray Bradbury
 |
| Displacement Booth | ||
| A teleportation portal. |
The displacement booths were the sole and ubiquitous form of travel in the future society of the novel.
| A displacement booth was a glass cylinder with a rounded top. The machinery that made the magic work was invisible, buried beneath the booth. Coin slots and a telephone dial were set into the glass at sternum level.
Jerryberry inserted his CBA credit card below the coin slots. He dialled by punching numbered buttons. Withdrawing the credit card closed a circuit. An eyeblink later he was in an office in the Central Broadcasting Association building in Downtown Los Angeles. |
| Technovelgy from Flash Crowd,
by Larry Niven. Published by Fantasy And Science Fiction in 1972 Additional resources -
|
Displacement booths are similar to the more technologically advanced stepping discs created by the alien Puppeteers of Niven's 1970 novel Ringworld.
In Flash Crowd, Niven explores the idea more thoroughly than in Ringworld. He adds additional material about how stepping discs are used by Puppeteers in his new book Fleet of Worlds, written with Edward M. Lerner.
Compare to the telepomp from The Man Without a Body (1877) by Edward Page Mitchell, the
stepping discs from Ringworld (1970) by Larry Niven and the
trip box from Eye of Cat (1982) by Roger Zelazny.
Also, see the libra-transmitter from Into the Meteorite Orbit by Frank R. Kelly, the cosmic express from The Cosmic Express by Jack Williamson, Jaunte from The Stars My Destination, the Transo from Time is the Simplest Thing by Clifford Simak and the geofractor (1939) from One Against the Legion by Jack Williamson.
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'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
