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"I'm strictly an ivory-tower person. I can explain things but I can't do things."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Static House | ||
| A house that was once fully psychotropic and malleable, but which had been frozen in one configuration. |
Along the beaches of Vermillion Sands, most people prefered psychotropic houses that could change to fit the mood of the occupant. Some home owners, however, owing to their mental instability or extreme moods, had so affected their houses for the worse that the houses needed to be frozen in one state to be usable.
| Curiously, Stamers was in no hurry to switch on. He pointed to left and right as we made our way up the glass staircase to the terrace, underlining various attractive features, but made no effort to find the control console, and I suspected that the house might be a static conversion - a fair number of PT houses are frozen in one or other position at the end of their working lives, and make tolerable static homes. |
| Technovelgy from The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista,
by J.G. Ballard. Published by Amazing Fact and Science Fiction in 1962 Additional resources -
|
SF writers sometimes go a long distance to show you something new, like a psychotropic house, and how great they are, and then suddenly return you to your dull present with a term like "static home."
A similar kind of term would be groundcar, an ordinary automobile in a world of aircars.
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
