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"A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content."
- Theodore Sturgeon
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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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'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
