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"Writing about the future, I have a vested interest in there being a future for me to write about."
- John Brunner
 |
| Crystal Corn | ||
| Tiny data storage crystals. |
Forrester woke up in the future, after dying in a fire. His body was burned beyond recognition, but he had been frozen until medical science advanced enough to heal the damage.
Have any improvements been made? He goes to a "book store."
| I spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century...
The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it... Thus all my purchases fitted into one pocket, though there must have been almost three hundred titles. My handful of crystal corn - my books. |
| Technovelgy from Return from the Stars,
by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Not known in 1961 Additional resources -
|
Samuel R. Delany uses a similar idea in The Jewels of Aptor (1968):
For another take on tiny data storage media, see the dime disk.
"True," answered Hama. Then his tone changed. "Do you know how the jewels work?"
They shook their heads.
"They are basically very simple mechanical contrivances which are difficult in execution, but simple in concept. I will explain. Human thoughts, it was discovered after the Great Fire during the first glorious years of the City of New Hope, did not produce waves similar to radio waves, but the electrical synapse pattern, it was found, can be read by radio waves, in the same way a mine detector reads the existence of metal."
"Radio?" Geo said.
"That's right," Hama said. "Oh, I forgot, you don't know anything about that at all. Well, I can't go through the whole thing now. Suffice it to say that each of the jewels contains a carefully honed crystal which is constantly sending out beams which can read these thought patterns. Also the crystal acts like a magnifying glass or a mirror, and reflects and magnifies the energy from the brain into heat or light or any other kind of electromagnetic radiation—there I go again—so that you can send great bolts of heat with them, as you have seen done.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Return from the Stars
More Ideas
and Technology by Stanislaw Lem
Tech news articles related to Return from the Stars
Tech news articles related to works by Stanislaw Lem
Crystal Corn-related
news articles:
- Crystals In Gel For Computer Memory
- Thanks For Being Open Apple, Amazon, Barnes And Noble
- Penguin E-Books For Libraries
- Hitachi Quartz Glass Memory Lasts Forever
- Data Crystals Offer Eternal Storage
| Project Silica Offers 'Long-Term' Digital Storage |
| Lonestar Offers Lunar Storage For Ultimate In Security |
| 100X Improvement In DNA Information Storage |
| Twist Bioscience High Density Digital Data On DNA |
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'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
'Then he became aware of a gentle pressure pushing him away from the ship.'
'And now they wre busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on...'
'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down...'
'Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence...'
'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
