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"The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. You look at the world around you, and take it apart into its components. Then you take some of those components, throw them away, and plug in different ones, start it up and see what happens."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Hand Computer | ||
| A small pocket-sized computing device. |
As far as I know, this is the first use of this phrase in science-fiction.
| Foster stared at his hand computer with distaste. It worked well enough but every operation had to be manually controlled and the answers were obtained in code. Now if he could use the school computer — Well, why dream, he felt conspicuous enough, as it was, carrying a hand computer under his arm every evening as he left his office. |
| Technovelgy from The Dead Past,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1956 Additional resources -
|
Niven and Pournelle used this phrase in Mote in God’s Eye:
There was a link. When the crew and scientists convened abort HMS Lenin to discuss the HMS McCarthur they logged in to their pocket computers and linked to the ship's main computer. When the xenobiologists convened on New Scotland to discuss the Motie representitives they tested the link between their hand computers and the main computer. When the Brownie took the pocket computer apart and then reassembled it, Sally tested it by linking to the ship's computer.
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
