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"It was my preferred entertainment when I was a kid, so when I set out to be a writer, it was perfectly natural that I should write the sort of stories that I used to enjoy reading."
- John Brunner
 |
| Reading Machine | ||
| Hand-held device "reads" the spools of Martian books. |
| Stanton peered down a corridor lined with racks of wire spools. He picked up a spool and stared at its title-tag...
“It seems to say, ‘The Under-Eaters’ — whatever that may mean.” Stanton juggled the tiny “book” undecidedly. “That phrase seems familiar somehow. What is it?” “Couldn’t say. Put it in the scanner and we'll find out.” Stanton obeyed, pulling a tiny reading-machine from its cubicle. The delicacy with which Stanton threaded the fragile wire into its proper receptacle was something to watch. The party had ruined a hundred spools of records before they’d learned how to adjust the scanners, and Stanton had learned caution. Stanton and his companion leaned back against the book-racks and watched the fluorescent screen of the scanner. A touch of the lever started its operation. There was a soundless flare of light on the screen as the wire made contact with the scanning apparatus, then the screen filled with the curious wavering peak-and-valley writing of the Martian graphic language. |
| Technovelgy from Mars-Tube,
by S.D. Gottesman. Published by Astonishing Stories in 1941 Additional resources -
|
The story continues:
BY THE end of the third “chapter” the title of the book was still almost as cryptic as ever. A sort of preface had indicated that "Under-Eaters” was a name applied to a race of underground demons who feasted on the flesh of living
Martians. Whether these really existed or not Stanton had no way of telling. The Martians had made no literary distinction between fact and fiction, as far as could be learned. It had been their opinion that anything except pure thought-transference was only approximately true, and that it would be useless to distinguish between an intentional and an unintentional falsehood.
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'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
