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"I don't know why I write science fiction. The voices in my head told me to!"
- Charles Stross
 |
| Airchair | ||
| A floating armchair. |
| Helping the thing into Gramps’ airchair, Phillipa swore. With the maintenance the ’chair required, it would’ve been cheaper to get a nerve regen. That wasn’t Gramps’ way, though — and apparently, it wasn’t going to be the lazarus’, either. A shelter Panic had put Gramps in that chair when he was still part time with the Civil Guard, and he was damned if he’d pay out good money to correct someone else’s mistake...
 (Personality-construct from ‘Killing Gramps' by Ann K. Schwader) Moments later, the lazarus’ airchair malfunctioned. From standard height, the device dropped to within a centimeter of the floor and began spinning erratically. Dumped off sideways, “Gramps” himself sprawled in an untidy heap, mumbling at random as his verbal programming choked. “The ’chair’s fritzing again,” Phillipa called to her mother. “Didn’t Gramps just have the thing serviced before he…” Abruptly, the ’chair rose to standard height again. “What’s that again, dear?” Meredith asked from the kitchen. “You know I can’t hear with the unsealer on.” Hauling the lazarus off the floor, Phillipa managed to get it seated before her mother came out. Gramps’ second-hand ’chair had evidently developed a new circuit problem triggered by the appliance. She doubted it could be fixed, though of course Meredith — and the lazarus — would insist on trying, at considerable expense. |
| Technovelgy from Killing Gramps,
by Ann K. Schwader. Published by Aboriginal Science Fiction in 1988 Additional resources -
|
Here's a more dynamic illustration:
(Armchair from 'Killing Gramps' by Ann K. Schwader)
I'm reminded of a much more elaborate variation on this idea from Foundation by Isaac Asimov:
He had been introduced to Lepold as one of a long line of introducees, and from a safe distance, for the king stood apart in lonely and impressive grandeur, surrounded by his deadly blaze of radioactive aura. And in less than an hour this same king would take his seat upon the massive throne of rhodium-iridium alloy with jewel-set gold chasings, and then, throne and all would rise maestically into the air, skim the ground slowly to hover before the great window from which the great crowds of common folk could see their king and shout themselves into near apoplexy. The throne would not have been so massive, of course, if it had not had a shielded nuclear motor built into it.
Here's an earlier example of the same idea, in a great illustration from Amazing Stories, 1929:
(Flying Chair from 'The Flying Fool' by David H. Keller (1929))
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'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.'
