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"SF looks towards an imaginary future, while fantasy, by and large, looks towards an imaginary past."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Mechanical Tune-Maker | ||
| An electromechanical device that created unique music. |
| The place was cool and dark. A few men and women were at the bar; the rest sat around tables. Some youths were playing throw in the back. A mechanical tune-maker wheezed and composed in the corner, a shabby, half-ruined machine only partially functioning... The drink mixer had long since fallen apart. Only wine and beer were served. No living man knew how to mix the simplest drink. |
| Technovelgy from Last of the Masters,
by Philip K. Dick. Published by Orbit Science Fiction in 1954 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the robot music described in The Robot God (1941) by Ray Cummings, the meloderge from Saboteur of Space (1944) by Robert Abernathy and the computer-created dub from Neuromancer by William Gibson.
See also the verse transcriber from Studio 5, The Stars, a 1971 short story by JG Ballard. Also, consider the Darkdawn city from Dying of the Light, a 1977 novel by George RR Martin.
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'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
'Then he became aware of a gentle pressure pushing him away from the ship.'
'And now they wre busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on...'
'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down...'
'Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence...'
'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
