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"People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research. I just enjoy reading the stuff, and some of it sticks in my mind and fits into the stories."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Machine Apartment | ||
| Each person lives isolated in their own room, supported by a vast planetary machine. |
Fascinating picture presented of life in isolation.
| Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk--that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh--a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs... |
| Technovelgy from The Machine Stops,
by E.M. Forster. Published by Oxford and Cambridge Review in 1909 Additional resources -
|
Everything you need - information, food, even medical care - is provided to you. No one needs to leave their room.
The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well.
See the reference for the telemedicine apparatus from the same story. See also micro-bachelor apartment from Idoru by William Gibson, automated apartment maintenance from Ubik by Philip K. Dick and Quadraturin from Quadraturin, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanowsky.
Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.
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Tech news articles related to The Machine Stops
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| AI-THu Shapeshifting Transformer Home |
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'Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space...'
'And the lifter was being piloted by a large pizza with extra cheese...'
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'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
'Our planes are going to start bringing in bales of discarded plastics...'
'... completely forgetting the ship at sight of the awesome figure and great head of the giant Gaut...'
