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"Everything starts as somebody's daydream. And, when you're daydreaming, it is science fiction. It's when you start work out how you put it together, true science fiction becomes real science."
- Larry Niven
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| Senso-Cells | ||
| Sensors that recorded personal characteristics of the owners of a house, to better serve their needs. |
The remarkable psychotropic houses of Vermillion Sands were able to reflect the most minute psychological quirks of their owners. They did this with plastex, a flexible plaster; but they needed input. For this, the senso-cell was used.
| Leisurely I retraced my way through the lounge and bedrooms, scanning the empty floors, running my hands over the smooth plastex walls, bracing myself to feel again the impact of Gloria Tremayne's personality. Blissfully, her presence would be everywhere in the house, a thousand echoes of her distilled into every matrix and senso-cell, each moment than anyone, apart from her dead husband, could ever know. |
| Technovelgy from The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista,
by J.G. Ballard. Published by Amazing Fact and Science Fiction in 1962 Additional resources -
|
You need some sort of compromise between a totally reactive house and the "non-responsive houses of the past:"
The first PT [psychotropic] houses had so many senso-cells distributed over them, echoing every shift of mood and position of the occupants, that living in one was like inhabiting someone else's brain.
The most commonly used sensors in homes are probably the thermostat (to keep the house at the temperature you want) and motion sensors. Motion sensors are being used for more than burglar alarms; they can also be used to turn lights or music on and off.
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'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
