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"It's also important to vary your stimuli. I always look for new things to shock the system. Just as you make muscles grow by shocking them, you make the mind grow by shocking it."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Worldcraft Bubble | ||
| An incredibly detailed mechanical simulation of a world. |
"'Own Your Own World' ... quite a slogan."
| The Worldcraft bubble glittered, catching the light...
Lora turned on the bubble. It glowed, winking into brilliance... She increased the magnification, bringing the microscopic central planet into focus... Again Lora increased the magnification. The central planet grew, showing a pale green ocean lapping faintly at a low shoreline. A city came into view, towers and broad streets, fine ribbons of gold and steel. Above, twin suns beamed down, warming the city. Myriads of inhabitants swarmed about their activities...
 (The Worldcraft Bubble from 'The Trouble with Bubbles' by Philip K. Dick) The inhabitants of the city came into sharp view. They hurried about their business, endless thousands of them. In cars and on foot. Across spidery spans between buildings, breathtakingly beautiful. |
| Technovelgy from The Trouble With Bubbles,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by If in 1953 Additional resources -
|
This idea is an interesting prediction of the current fascination with artificial, computer-generated worlds in games like Spore.
Compare to the Neoterics from Theodore Sturgeon's 1941 novella Microcosmic God, the pocket universe from Murray Leinster's 1946 story of that name and the Kingdom in a Box from Stanislaw Lem's story collection The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age.
We couldn't leave Terra so we built our own worlds right here. Sub-atomic worlds, in controlled containers. We start life going on a sub-atomic world, feed it problems to make it evolve, try to raise it higher and higher... It's certainly a creative pastime. Not a merely passive viewing like television..."
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Trouble With Bubbles
More Ideas
and Technology by Philip K. Dick
Tech news articles related to The Trouble With Bubbles
Tech news articles related to works by Philip K. Dick
Worldcraft Bubble-related
news articles:
- Our World Formed In A Bubble?
- Satoshi Tomizu Creates Pocket Universes And Worldcraft Bubbles In Glass
| Terraformer Industries Make Methane |
| Ridiculous 'Ghost Murmur' Tech Still Science Fiction |
| Infrared Contact Lenses To See In The Dark |
| Can 'Tactical Umbrellas' Shield One From Drones |
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
