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Science Fiction
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"...being predictive, being right about the future, is not the point of any given story or novel. The point is about exploring as wide a range of possibilities as possible."
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The innovation here is that a person could get the time from a central source, rather than a local timepiece that had been synchronized with a central source (but which now varied).
As early as 1904, the United States Naval Observatory (USNO) was broadcasting time signals from the city of Boston as an aid to navigation. In 1922, the BBC added time "pips' to their broadcast to aid in time synchrony. In the 1850's, a Meridian Circle Telescope was installed in the University of Michigan's Detroit Observatory in Ann Arbor; the time as determined from observation of stars and the Sun was used to coordinate shipping and trains in the Great Lakes region.
Today, of course, we all carry smartphones that get their time directly from a central source.
The communication disk also served as a telephone:
But the dead flatness of her voice against the tiny diaphragm told her that this device too was altered to enforce obedience to the edict her parent had but now pronounced...
Compare to the pulse-timer from Heretics of Dune (1984), by Frank Herbert and the voice-clock from The Martian Chronicles (1950), by Ray Bradbury. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'...Anything was possible in my imaginary environment.'
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'Hocus-pocus religions and archaic weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.'
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