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"At its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we can't predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe."
- John Brunner
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| Trace Web | ||
| A small, handheld device that contacts (and even instantiates) the larger network. |
Fascinating early use of the word web for a vast, interrelated data network.
| "Here we go, sir," the robot pilot said. The words startled Rogers and made him look up sharply. He tensed his body and adjusted the trace web inside his coat as the bubble ship started dropping, swiftly and silently, toward the planet's surface...
Rogers' fingers touched the trace web. The web warmed into life. "I'm sorry to hear that," he said. |
| Technovelgy from Souvenir,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Fantastic Universe in 1954 Additional resources -
|
Based on this usage, people should start calling their phone a "web" anytime now.
Compare to the control-face from William Gibson's 1996 novel Idoru and of course to the Joymaker from Frederik Pohl's 1966 novel The Age of the Pussyfoot.
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'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.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
