Commercial flies, tiny insects that carry advertiser messages, are science fiction; everybody knows that. Philip K. Dick wrote about this idea in his 1966 novel The Simulacra:
Something sizzled to the right of him. A commercial, made by Theodorus Nitz, the worst house of all, had attached itself to his car.
"Get off," he warned it. But the commercial, well-adhered, began to crawl, buffeted by the wind, toward the door and the entrance crack. It would soon have squeezed in and would be haranguing him in the cranky, garbagey fashion of the Nitz advertisements.
He could, as it came through the crack, kill it. It was alive, terribly mortal: the ad agencies, like nature, squandered hordes of them.
(Read more about Dick's commercial flies)
Apparently, nobody told Eichborn, a German publisher, which released hundreds of houseflies with ultralight banner ads glued to their hind ends.
(Commercial fly wears banner ad)
In the following video, attendees at the Frankfurt Book Fair are delighted by novelty. Just wait until there are millions of these.
(Banner ads on commercial flies)
SF writer Jeff Noon also deserves a hat-tip for his blurbflies from his highly enjoyable 2000 novel Nymphomation.
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!)
is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for
the Invention Category that interests
you, the Glossary, the Invention
Timeline, or see what's New.
RoboShiko! Sumo Exercises Still Good For Robots
'... the expressionless face before me was therefore that of the golem-wrestler, Rolem, a creature that could be set for five times the strength of a human being.'