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"Does it open a new horizon for my thinking? Does it lead me to think new kinds of thoughts, that I would not otherwise perhaps have thought at all? These qualities are what [make] science fiction ...unique."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Picphone | ||
| A small telephone that has a screen to show pictures. |
Who thought about playing games on a phone in the 1970's? Only Philip K. Dick.
| The left wall of the cab opened and a picphone slid out, cord twisted in a baroque loop....
Seating himself, Buckman began an idle colortone game with the picphone; he flashed the flags of various extinct nations. |
| Technovelgy from Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday in 1974 Additional resources -
|
Although the "picphone" is not a portable cell phone, it is still an interesting presentation of an idea that didn't come true for another forty years. No one thought about playing some sort of a game with their phone until after the turn of the 20th century. I grew up in the 1960's and a telephone was a single purpose device for making phone calls.
See also the pocketphone from Heinlein's 1953 novel Assignment in Eternity. As far as I know, the first reference to a pocket-sized telephone is in Heinlein's 1948 novel Space Cadet - the portable telephone.
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'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors...'
'The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
