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"[Science fiction] is the one literary medium left in which we have a free hand. We can do any damn thing we please."
- Alfred Bester
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| Autonomic Cab | ||
| An automated taxicab (without robotic driver). |
This is an early instance of this phrase in Dick's work.
| "Thy destination, your eminence," the autonomic cab informed him, halting before a large but mostly subsurface structure...
He paid the cab, hopped from it, and scuttled across a short open space for a ramp... |
| Technovelgy from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1965 Additional resources -
|
Dick expands on the idea in Now Wait For Last Year, published in 1966.
Compare this to the autocab from Heinlein's 1951 novel Between Planets and the Tin Cabbie from James Blish's 1957 Cities in Flight.
The earliest mention I know about is the driverless taxi from The Living Machine (1935) by David H. Keller.
The cab said, "Are you Mr. Rip Van Winkle or something, sir? It's 2055. And I hope it satisfies you." The cab was old and was somewhat seedy, needing repairs; its irritability showed in the activity of its autonomic circuitry.
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Tech news articles related to works by Philip K. Dick
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
