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"I am first of all not a science fiction writer … I write, I suppose, what the Latin Americans call magic realism."
- Harlan Ellison
 |
| 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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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
| 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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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
