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"...a few centuries of coherent humanist thought, set against a million odd years of evolved killer ape tendency. No-one's going to give you very good odds on humanism, are they?"
- Richard Morgan

Crystal Corn  
  Tiny data storage crystals.  

Forrester woke up in the future, after dying in a fire. His body was burned beyond recognition, but he had been frozen until medical science advanced enough to heal the damage.

Have any improvements been made? He goes to a "book store."

I spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century...

The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it... Thus all my purchases fitted into one pocket, though there must have been almost three hundred titles. My handful of crystal corn - my books.

Technovelgy from Return from the Stars, by Stanislaw Lem.
Published by Not known in 1961
Additional resources -

For another take on tiny data storage media, see the dime disk.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Return from the Stars
  More Ideas and Technology by Stanislaw Lem
  Tech news articles related to Return from the Stars
  Tech news articles related to works by Stanislaw Lem

Crystal Corn-related news articles:
  - Crystals In Gel For Computer Memory
  - Thanks For Being Open Apple, Amazon, Barnes And Noble
  - Penguin E-Books For Libraries
  - Hitachi Quartz Glass Memory Lasts Forever
  - Data Crystals Offer Eternal Storage

Articles related to Data Storage
Lonestar Offers Lunar Storage For Ultimate In Security
100X Improvement In DNA Information Storage
Twist Bioscience High Density Digital Data On DNA
Store One Bit On One Atom

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