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"Tokyo homeless people reiterate the whole nature of living in Tokyo in cardboard boxes, they're only slightly smaller than Tokyo apartments, and they have almost as many consumer goods. It's a nightmare of boxes within boxes."
- William Gibson
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| Telechart | ||
| An interactive metal plate upon which were displayed celestial objects for interstellar navigation. |
| "The dark star is coming toward us at a tremendous velocity, remember. You will notice on the telechart-"
Together we stepped over to the big telechart, a great rectangular plate of smoothly burnished silvery metal which hung at the bridgeroom's end-wall, the one indispensable aid to interstellar navigation. Upon it were accurately reproduced, by means of projected and reflected rays, the positions and progress of all heavenly bodies near the ship. Intently we contemplated it now. At the rectangle's lower edge there gleamed on the smooth metal a score or more of little circles of glowing light, of varying sizes, representing the suns of the edge of the galaxy behind us. Outermost of these glowed the light-disk that was our own sun, and around this Hurus Hol had drawn a shining line or circle lying more than four billion miles from our own sun, on the chart. He had computed that if the approaching dark star came closer than that to our sun its mightly gravitational attracction would inevitably draw the latter out with it into space; so the shining line represented, for us, the danger line. |
| Technovelgy from Crashing Suns,
by Edmond Hamilton. Published by Popular Fiction Publishing Co. in 1928 Additional resources -
|
One of the features that I like best is that it is interactive; it is not merely a display. The user can draw lines on it.
In other stories (like "Outside the Universe"), Hammond referred to it as a "space-chart".
Compare to the more advanced tank display from E.E. 'Doc' Smith's 1934 novel Triplanetary.
See also automatic navigator in A Matter of Size (1934) by Harry Bates, the
chart cabinet in One Against the Legion (1939) by Jack Williamson, the
pilot-robot in Collision Orbit (1941) also by Williamson and the article on astrogation in Methuselah's Children (1941) by Robert Heinlein.
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I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
'...it was all composed of tiny, identical cubes, carefully laid to form a tilelike surface.'
'He carried on his person a triggering mechanism sensitive to his heartbeat.'
'...Anything was possible in my imaginary environment.'
'Somewhere in space, a chrome and blue automobile raced the green light of Earth.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair...'
