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"I would say 75% of the economy is now being run by ex-science-fiction fans."
- Greg Bear
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| Static House | ||
| A house that was once fully psychotropic and malleable, but which had been frozen in one configuration. |
Along the beaches of Vermillion Sands, most people prefered psychotropic houses that could change to fit the mood of the occupant. Some home owners, however, owing to their mental instability or extreme moods, had so affected their houses for the worse that the houses needed to be frozen in one state to be usable.
| Curiously, Stamers was in no hurry to switch on. He pointed to left and right as we made our way up the glass staircase to the terrace, underlining various attractive features, but made no effort to find the control console, and I suspected that the house might be a static conversion - a fair number of PT houses are frozen in one or other position at the end of their working lives, and make tolerable static homes. |
| Technovelgy from The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista,
by J.G. Ballard. Published by Amazing Fact and Science Fiction in 1962 Additional resources -
|
SF writers sometimes go a long distance to show you something new, like a psychotropic house, and how great they are, and then suddenly return you to your dull present with a term like "static home."
A similar kind of term would be groundcar, an ordinary automobile in a world of aircars.
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'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
'Midges have many capabilities. To the untrained eye, they look like sparrows.'
'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...'
