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"I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'Science Fiction' and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 |
| Mook | ||
| Computer-based proxy that deals with communication. |
| He flicked on Eddy’s mediator, to boot the wallscreen. Before he could try anything with the cablebox, his mother’s mook pounced upon the screen. On Eddy’s giant wallscreen, the mook’s waxy, computer-generated face looked like a plump satin pillowcase. Its bowtie was as big as a racing shoe. |
| Technovelgy from Bicycle Repairman,
by Bruce Sterling. Published by Intersections in 1997 Additional resources -
|
Here's more:
“Please hold for an incoming vidcall from Andrea Schweik of Carnac Instruments,” the mook uttered unctuously.
Lyle cordially despised all lowdown phonetagging artificially intelli- gent mooks. For a while, in his teenage years, Lyle himself had owned a mook, an off-the-shelf shareware job that he’d installed in the condo’s phone. Like most mooks, Lyle’s mook had one primary role: dealing with unsolicited phone calls from other people’s mooks. In Lyle’s case these were the creepy mooks of career counselors, school psychiatrists, truancy cops, and other official hindrances. When Lyle’s mook launched and ran, it appeared online as a sly warty dwarf that drooled green ichor and talked in a basso grumble.
But Lyle hadn’t given his mook the properly meticulous care-and-de- bugging that such fragile little constructs demanded, and eventually his cheap mook had collapsed into artificial insanity.
He flicked on Eddy’s mediator, to boot the wallscreen. Before he could try anything with the cable-box, his mother’s mook pounced upon the screen.
On Eddy’s giant wallscreen, the mook’s waxy computer-generated face looked like a plump satin pillowcase. Its bow tie was as big as a racing shoe.
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'...waldoes in the screen followed in exact, simultaneous parallelism.'
'Seen close it was not completely flexible, but made instead of pivoted and smoothly finished segments.'
'...great rectangular slabs of muscle, slung into a rectangular frame.'
'If the biological robots were not living creatures, they were certainly very good imitations.'
"Everybody and his dog, it seemed, wanted to live out in the country; transportation and communication were no longer isolating factors."
